Collected Stories

On the Zattere

Without meaning to, Verity had taken her mother’s place. Six months after her mother’s death she had given up her flat and moved back to the house where she and her two brothers – both of them now married – had grown up. She had pretended, even to herself at times, that she was concerned about her father’s loneliness, but the true reason was that she wished to make a change on her own account, to break a pattern in her life. She became, as her mother had been, her father’s chief companion and was in time exposed to traits in his nature she had not known existed. Preserving within the family the exterior of a bluff and genial man, good-hearted, knowledgeable and wise, her father had successfully disguised the worst of himself; and had been assisted by his wife’s loyalty. It was different for a daughter, and Verity found herself watching the old man in a way she would once not have believed possible, impatient with his weaknesses, judging him.

Mr Unwill, unaware of this development in his daughter, was greatly pleased with the turn events had taken. He was touched when Verity gave up her flat and returned to the family home, and he was proud to be seen in her company, believing that strangers might not take her for his daughter but assume instead that he was an older man to whom this beautiful woman was sentimentally attached. He dressed the part when they went on their first holiday together – to Venice, which every autumn in her lifetime he had visited with his wife. In swirls of green and red, a paisley scarf was knotted at his throat and matched the handkerchief that spilt from the top pocket of his navy-blue blazer. There was no reason why they should be taken as father and daughter, he argued to himself, since they were so very different in appearance. Verity, who was neither small nor tall, gave an impression of slightness because she was slim and was delicately made. The nearly perfect features of her face were set on the suspicion of a slant, turning ordinary beauty into the unusual and causing people who saw it for the first time to glance again. Her hair, clinging smoothly around the contours of classically high cheekbones, was the brown of chestnuts; her eyes, almost strangely, matched it. She dressed and made up with care, as if believing that beauty should be honoured.

In contrast, Mr Unwill was a large man in his advanced sixties, with a ruddy complexion and a bald head. People who knew him quite well had difficulty remembering, when no longer in his presence, if he had a moustache or not. The lingering impression of his face – the ruddiness, the tortoiseshell spectacles – seemed somehow to suggest another, taken-for-granted characteristic, and in fact there was one: a grey growth of bristle on his upper lip, unnoticeable because it so easily became one with the similar greyness that flanked the naked dome.

‘Well, what shall you do today?’ he asked in the pensione dining-room when they had finished breakfast on their third day. ‘I’ll be all right, you know. Don’t spare a worry for me.’

‘I thought I’d go to the Church of San Zaccaria.’

‘Why not? You trot along, my dear. I’ll sit and watch the boats go by.’

They were alone in the dining-room: in early November the pensione was not full. The American family had not come in to breakfast, presumably having it in their rooms. The German girls had been and gone; so had the French threesome and the lone Italian lady in her purple hat.

‘Nice, those German girls,’ Mr Unwill said. ‘The pretty one made a most interesting observation last night.’ He paused, tobacco-stained teeth bared, his eyes ruminative behind his spectacles. ‘She said she wondered where waiters go between meals. Most unGermanic, I thought.’

Verity, who was thirty-eight and had recently come to believe that life was going to pass her by, reached across the table and took one of her father’s cigarettes from the packet that was open beside his coffee cup. She acknowledged the observation of the German girl by briefly nodding. She lit her cigarette from the flame of a small, gold lighter, given to her by the man she’d been in Venice with before.

‘The pretty one’s from Munich,’ her father said. ‘The other – now, where on earth did they tell me the fat one came from?’ Furrows of thought appeared on his forehead, then he gave up. Slowly he removed his spectacles and in the same unhurried manner proceeded to wipe them with his paisley handkerchief. It was a way of his, a hobby almost. The frames were polished first, then each lens; sometimes he went to work with his Swiss penknife, tightening the screws of the hinges with the screwdriver that was incorporated in one of the blades. ‘The pretty one’s a laboratory assistant,’ he said, ‘the other one works in a shop or something.’

The penknife had not, this morning, been taken from his blazer pocket. He held the spectacles up to the light. ‘I’ll probably sit outside at the Cucciolo,’ he said.

‘The coffee’s better at Nico’s. And cheaper.’

It was he – years ago, so he said – who had established that, and yesterday it had been confirmed. She’d sat outside the Cucciolo by mistake, forgetting what he’d told her, obliging him to join her when he emerged from the pensione after his afternoon sleep. He’d later pointed out that a cappuccino at the Cucciolo was fifteen hundred but only eleven at Nico’s or Aldo’s. Her father was mean about spending small sums of money, Verity had discovered since becoming his companion. He didn’t like it when she reached out and helped herself to one of his cigarettes, but he hadn’t yet learnt to put the packet away quickly.

‘Oh, I don’t know that I’m up to the walk to Nico’s this morning,’ he said.

It took less than a minute to stroll along the Zattere to Nico’s, and he was never not up to things. She had discovered also that whenever he felt like it he told petty, unimportant lies, and as they left the dining-room she wondered what this latest one was all about.

Straining a white jacket, beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead, the pensione’s bearded waiter used a battery-powered gadget to sweep the crumbs from the tablecloths in the dining-room. His colleague, similarly attired and resembling Fred Astaire, laid two tables for the guests who had chosen to have lunch rather than dinner.

The dining-room was low-ceilinged, with mirrors and sideboards set against the fawn silk on the walls, and windows of round green panes. The breathing of the bearded waiter and the slurping of the canal just outside these windows were the only sounds after the crumbs had been cleared and the tables laid. The waiters glanced over their domain and went away to spend their time mysteriously, justifying the German girl’s curiosity.

In the hall of the pensione guests who were never seen in the dining-room, choosing to take no meals, awaited the attention of the smart receptionist, this morning all in red. A kitten played on her desk while patiently she gave directions to the Church of the Frari. She told the Italian lady with the purple hat that there was a dry cleaner’s less than a minute away. ‘Pronto?’ she said, picking up her telephone. The hall, which was not large, featured in the glass door of the telephone-box and the doors that led outside the same round green panes as the dining-room. There were faded prints on the walls, and by the reception desk a map of Venice and a list of the pensione’s credit-card facilities. A second cat, grey and gross and bearing the marks of a lifetime’s disputes, lay sleeping on the stairs.

‘Enjoy yourself, my dear,’ Mr Unwill said to his daughter, stepping over this animal. She didn’t appear to hear so he said it again when they had passed through the round-paned doors and stood together for a moment on the quayside.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably wander a bit after I’ve been to San Zaccaria.’

‘Why not, old girl? I’ll be as happy as a sandboy, you know.’

The fog that had earlier obscured the houses of the Giudecca on the other side of the canal was lifting; already the sun evaporated the dankness in the air. Verity wore a flecked suit of pinkish-orange, with a scarf that matched it loosely tied over a cream blouse. In one lapel there was a tiny pearl brooch, another gift from the man she’d been in Venice with before.

She turned into the fondamenta that ran along one side of the pensione. It was cold there, untouched by the November sunshine. She shivered, but felt it was not from this chilliness. She wished she was not alone, for an irony in her present circumstance was that she found the company of other people both tiresome and of use. She walked more quickly, endeavouring to keep certain insistent thoughts out of her mind. At the Accademia she bought her ticket for the vaporetto and waited on the landing-stage. Other people, no matter who they were, disrupted such thoughts, which was something she welcomed. The attention other people demanded, the conversations they began, their faces and their voices, clogged her communication with herself; and yet, so much of the time while in the company of other people, she wished she was not.

Odd, to have taken her mother’s place in this old-fashioned way: on the vaporetto she saw again the tortoiseshell spectacles in her father’s hands, his square, wide fingers working the paisley silk over the lens. Repetition had etched this image in some corner of her mind: she heard his early-morning cough, and then the lowered tone he used when talking to himself. Had it been panic that had caused her to use his loneliness as an excuse, to break the pattern she found so merciless? Love-making had been easy in the convenient flat, too much had been taken for granted. But even so, giving up the flat might have struck some people as extreme.

On the vaporetto the Italians glanced at her, women assessing her in some Italian way, the men desirous. Venice was different in November, less of a bauble than the summer city she remembered. The tourist crowds had gone, with the mosquitoes and the cruel Italian heat. The orchestras had ceased to play in the Piazza San Marco, the Riva degli Schiavoni was again the property of the Venetians. She imagined her parents walking arm in arm on the Riva, or going to Torcello and Burano. Had the warmth of their companionship been a pretence on his part? For if he’d loved his wife how could he so easily come back to the city he and she had discovered together and had affectionately made their own? Eleven months had passed since her death and already in the pensione they had come to know so well he was striking up acquaintanceships as though nothing of importance had occurred since last he’d been there. There had been a moment in the hall when he mumblingly spoke to the smartly dressed receptionist, who said that everyone at the pensione sympathized. The elderly maid who welcomed him upstairs had murmured in Italian, and in the dining-room the waiters’ voices had been low at first. It was he himself who subsequently set the mood, his matter-of-fact manner brushing sentiment aside, summarily dismissing death. Had her mother loved him or had their companionship in this city been, on her part also, a pretence? Marriage was riddled with such falsity, Verity reflected, dressed up as loyalty or keeping faith.

Palaces loomed majestically on either side of her, the lion of St Mark disdainful on his column, St Theodore modest on his. Carpaccio would still have recognized his city in the tranquillity of November, the Virgins of Cima still crossed the city’s bridges. It was her mother who had said all that to her, translating emotions she had felt. Verity went on thinking about her parents, not wishing to think about herself, not wishing to catch a glimpse of herself in the summer dresses she had worn when she’d been in Venice before. There had been many weekends spent faithfully with the same companion in many beautiful cities, but Venice that July had left behind a special meaning because hope had died there.

Mr Unwill settled himself on one of the Cucciolo Bar’s orange plastic seats. Verity was right: the Cucciolo wasn’t a patch on Nico’s or Aldo’s. Fewer people passed by for a start, and the one cappuccino he’d been served yesterday by the Cucciolo’s dour waiter had tasted of the last person’s sugar. But the trouble with sitting outside Nico’s or Aldo’s was that people often turned off the Zattere before they reached them, and he happened to know that the pretty little German girl was still in the pensione because he’d seen the fat one striding off on her own half an hour ago. Of course it could be that the pretty one had preceded her friend, in which case he’d be four hundred lire down, which would be annoying.

‘Prego, signore?’

He ordered his coffee. He wished he spoke Italian so that he might draw the waiter’s attention to the inadequately washed cup he’d been presented with yesterday. He’d have done so in England: one of the few good things about being old was that you could make a fuss. Another was that you could drop into conversation with people without their thinking it was peculiar of you. Last night he’d wandered in from his stroll after Verity had gone to her room, and had noticed the two girls in the lounge. He’d leafed through a pile of magazines that had to do with the work of the Venetian police, and then the girls had begun to giggle unrestrainedly. By way of a polite explanation, the pretty one had spoken to him in English, explaining that it was the remark about where waiters go between meals which had caused their merriment. After that the conversation had drifted on. He’d told them a thing or two about Venice, which he knew quite well in a professional way.

Mr Unwill was retired, having been employed for all his adult life in a shipping office. Ships and their cargoes, the building, sale and insuring of ships, were what he was most familiar with. It was this interest that had first brought him to Venice, as it had to many other great ports. While his three children were still growing up it had been necessary to limit such travel to the British Isles, but later he and his wife had travelled as far and as adventurously as funds permitted, always economizing so that journeys might be extended or prolonged. Venice had become their favourite.

‘Hullo there!’ he called out to the German girl as she stepped around the corner, shading her eyes against the sun. She was wearing a short dress that was almost the same colour as her very blonde hair.

‘What a day!’ Mr Unwill said, standing up so that she could not easily just walk by. ‘Now, how about a coffee?’

Her teeth, when she smiled her appreciation of this invitation, glistened damply, large white teeth, each one perfectly shaped. But to his disappointment, while smiling she also shook her head. She was late already, she explained: she was to meet her friend at the Rialto Bridge.

He watched her hurrying along the Zattere, her sturdy legs nicely bronzed, a camera slung across her shoulder. She turned the corner by the Church of the Gesuati and Mr Unwill sighed.

In the Church of San Zaccaria Verity gazed at the Bellini altarpiece her mother had sent her postcards of. Perfectly, she still contained her thoughts, conjecturing again. Had her mother stood on this very spot? Had her father accompanied her to the churches she liked so much or in all their visits had he been concerned only with duller interests? Verity didn’t know; it had never seemed important.

The lights that illuminated the picture abruptly went out. Verity felt in her purse for two hundred lire, but before she found the coins a man stepped forward and dropped his through the slot of the little grey box on one side of the altar. The Virgin and her saints, in sacred conversation, were there again. Verity looked for a few moments longer and then moved away.

She hadn’t looked at pictures that July. For a second she saw herself and heard her laughter: in a dress with primroses on it, wearing sunglasses and laughing, although she had not felt like laughing. In the church she felt again the effort of that laughter and was angry because for a single second her concentration had faltered. She dropped some money into a poor-box by the door. She hadn’t realized how fond she’d been of her mother until the very last moment, until the coffin had soundlessly slipped away behind a beige curtain in the chapel of the crematorium. The soundlessness was eerie and unpleasant; Verity had hated that moment.

She left the church and walked back to the Riva. Metal trestles supported planks of wood, like crude tabletops, on which people might walk if the tides rose and the floods of autumn began. These improvised bridges were called passerelle, her father had told her, pointing them out to her on the Zattere. ‘Oh heavens, of course I’ll manage,’ he’d kept repeating on the afternoon of the funeral and all of them, her brothers and her sisters-in-law, she herself, had admired his urbanity and his resolve not to be a nuisance.

She rose and walked slowly along the Riva towards the Arsenale. Already the quayside hotels had a deserted look; the pink Gabrielli-Sandwirth had put up its shutters. ‘No, absolutely not,’ her father had said on some later occasion. ‘You have your own life, Verity.’ And of Course she had: her own life, her own job, her own flat in which love might be made.

A fun-fair was being erected further along the quay, dodgem cars and a tunnel of fear, swing-boats and fruit machines. ‘American Games’ a garish announcement read; ‘Central Park’ proclaimed another. Two bespectacled old women washed down a rifle-range; hobby-horses were unloaded. Outside the Pensione Bucintoro a shirt-sleeved waiter smoked a cigarette and watched.

In the Via Garibaldi children with satchels or school books chased one another on their journey home from morning school; women jostled and pushed at the vegetable stalls. In the public park, tatty and forgotten in the low season, cats swarmed or huddled – mangy tomcats with ravenous eyes, pitiful kittens that seemed resentful of their recent birth, leanly slinking mothers. All of them were dirty; two weakly fought, a hissing, clawing ball of different-coloured fur. Verity bent down and tried to attract a dusty marmalade-coloured kitten, but alarmed by her attentions it darted off. She walked on, still determinedly dwelling upon her father’s heartlessness in so casually returning to this city, to the pensione, to the Zattere. She dwelt again upon her mother’s misplaced loyalty, which had kept the marriage going. But she herself, in her primrose-yellow dress and her sunglasses, crept through these irrelevant reflections so crudely forced upon her consciousness. Her parents arm-in-arm in Venice, loving or not loving, vanished into wisps of mist, and were replaced by the sound of her own ersatz laughter. There was an image of her face, strained with a smile that choked away the hopelessness she was frightened to surrender to. The ice tinkled in her well-chilled Soave; the orchestras played in the great, romantic square. ‘Oh, I am happy!’ came the echo of her lying voice, and in the dingy public park her beauty fled as swiftly as the marmalade kitten had leapt from her grasp. She wept, but it did not matter because no one was about.

Mr Unwill, deprived of a conversation with the German girl, left the Cucciolo Bar and strolled down the Zattere in the direction of the western Stazione Marittima. It was an interesting place, this particular Stazione Marittima, and he would like one day to find someone who would show him round it. He often loitered by the bridge that led almost directly into it, hoping to catch the eye of some official with an hour or two on his hands who would welcome the interest of an Englishman who had been concerned with maritime commerce for a lifetime. But the officials were always in a hurry, and usually in groups of three or four, which made matters difficult. Clerks of course they’d be, not quite right anyway. Once he’d noticed a man with gold braid on his cap and his uniform, but when Mr Unwill smilingly approached him the man expostulated wildly, alarmed presumably by the sound of a language he did not understand. Mr Unwill had thought it a strange reaction in a seafaring man, who should surely be used to the world’s tongues.

A cargo boat called the Allemagna Express, registered in Venice in spite of its German-sounding name, and flying the Italian flag, was being painted. On planks suspended along the side of its hull men dipped long-handled rollers into giant paint-containers which dangled at a convenient drop below each man. A single painter used a brush, touching in the red outline on the letters of Allemagna Express. Cautiously he moved back and forth on his plank, often calling up to his colleagues on the deck to work one of the ropes or pulleys. A yellow stripe extended the length of the hull, separating the white of the ship’s upper reaches from the brown beneath, The old girl was certainly beginning to look smart, Mr Unwill considered, and wondered if they’d still be in Venice when the job was completed. There was nothing as rewarding as a well-painted ship, nothing as satisfying even if your own contribution had only been to watch the men at work. Mr Unwill sat for a long time on a stone bench on the quayside, content in this unexacting role. He wondered why Express was spelt with an ‘x’ since the vessel was Italian. That morning from his bedroom window he’d noticed the Espresso Egitto chugging by.

At half past eleven he rose and walked to Nico’s, where he bought a banana ice-cream and ate it sitting on a passerella.

‘There was a time, you know, when the Venetians could build a warship in a day.’

For dinner they sat at a round table in a corner of the low-ceilinged dining-room of the pensione. The bearded waiter doled out salad on to side plates, and the one who looked like Fred Astaire went round with platters of chicken and fried potatoes.

‘I passed near the Arsenale today,’ Verity said, remembering that that was where such warships had been built. ‘Grazie’

‘Prego, signorina.’

‘You called in at the Naval Museum, did you?’

‘No, actually I didn’t.’

Apart from the German girls, the people who’d been in the dining-room the night before were there again. The American woman, with a blue-and-white bow tie, sat with her husband and her daughter at the table closest to the Unwills’. The two thin Frenchwomen and the frail man were beside the screen that prevented draughts. The solitary Italian woman in the purple hat was by the door. Other Italians, a couple who had not been in the dining-room last night, were at a table next to the German girls.

‘I remember going to the Naval Museum,’ Mr Unwill said. ‘Oh, years ago. When I was first in Venice with your mother.’

‘Did she go too?’

‘Your mother always liked to accompany me to places. Most interesting she found the Naval Museum. Well, anyone would.

He went on talking, telling her about the Naval Museum; she didn’t listen. That afternoon she’d gone across to the Lido because it was a part of Venice they hadn’t visited that July. But instead of the escape she’d hoped for she’d caught a nostalgic, mood from its windswept, shuttered emptiness and its dead casino. She’d sat in a bar drinking brandy she didn’t like the taste of, and when she returned to the pensione she found herself not wanting to change out of the clothes she’d worn all day. She’d seen her father glancing in surprise at her tired orange suit and she’d felt, ridiculously, that she was letting him down.

‘Ah, here they are!’ he exclaimed, making a sudden noise as the German girls entered. ‘Buona sera!’ he shouted at them eagerly.

The girls smiled, and Verity wondered what on earth they thought of him. One of the Frenchwomen was complaining that her gnocchi was cold. The waiter who resembled Fred Astaire looked worried. She could not eat cold gnocchi, the woman protested, throwing her fork down, marking the white tablecloth.

‘Where have you been today?’ Mr Unwill called across the dining-room to the German girls. ‘Done something nice?’

‘Ja,’ the fat girl replied. ‘We have been in a glass factory.’

‘Very sensible,’ said Mr Unwill.

Another plate of gnocchi replaced the cold one at the French table. The American woman told her daughter that on her wedding day in Nevada she had thrown a cushion out of a window because she’d felt joyful. ‘I guess your momma’d been drinking,’ the father said, laughing very noisily. The Italian couple talked about the Feast of St Martin.

There had been only one love-making weekend since she’d moved back to the family house: she’d told her father some lie, not caring if he guessed.

‘It’s an interesting thing,’ he was saying to her now, ‘this St Martin business. They have a week of it, you know. Old people and children get gifts. Have you seen the confections in the shop windows? San Martino on horseback?’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed them.’ Made of biscuit, she had presumed, sometimes chocolate-coated, sometimes not, icing decorated with sweets.

‘And cotognata,’ he went on. ‘Have you seen the cotognata? Centuries old, that St Martin’s sweetmeat is, far nicer than Turkish delight.’

She smiled, and nodded. She’d noticed the cotognata also. She often wondered how he came by his information, and guessed he was for ever dropping into conversation with strangers in the hope that they spoke English.

‘The first ghetto was in Venice,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? It’s an Italian word, called after the place where the Jewish settlement was.’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, there you are. Something every day.’

The bearded waiter cleared their plates away and brought them each a bowl of fruit.

‘I thought we might wander down the Zattere after dinner,’ her father suggested, ‘and take a glass of mandarinetto and perhaps a slice of cake. Feel up to that, old girl?’

If she didn’t accompany him he’d bother the German girls. She said a glass of mandarinetto would be nice.

‘They’re painting the Allemagna Express. Fine-looking vessel.’

In her bedroom she tied a different scarf around her neck, and put her coat on because the nights were cold. When she returned to the hall her father was not there and when he did appear he came from the dining-room not from upstairs. ‘I told them we were going for a drink,’ he said. ‘They’ll join us in a moment. You all right, old girl?’

He was smoking a cigarette and, like her, he had gone to his room for his overcoat. On the Zattere he put his hat on at a jaunty angle. There was a smell of creosote because they’d been repainting the rafts that afternoon. Sheets of newspaper were suspended from strings that were looped along the quayside to draw attention to the newly treated timbers. A terrier settled down for the night among the rubble on a builder’s barge. Cats crept about. It was extraordinary, she suddenly thought, that just because she’d given up her flat she should find herself in Venice with this old man.

‘Nice here, eh?’ he said in the café, surveying the amber-coloured cloths on the tables, the busyness behind the bar. He took his hat and overcoat off, and sat down. He stubbed his cigarette out and lit a fresh one. ‘Mandarinetto,’ he said to the waiter who came up. ‘Due.’

‘Si, signore. Subito.’

She lit a cigarette herself, caressing her lighter with her fingers, then feeling angry and ashamed that she had done so.

‘Ah, here they are!’ Her father was on his feet, exclaiming like a schoolboy, waving his hat at the German girls. He shouted after the waiter, ordering two more mandarinettos. ‘I really recommend it here,’ he informed the German girls, flashing his tobacco-stained smile about and offering them cigarettes. He went on talking, telling them about the Allemagna Express. He mentioned the Stazione Marittima and asked them if they had noticed the biscuit horsemen and the cotognata. ‘By the weekend the Votive Bridge will be complete,’ he said. ‘A temporary timber bridge, you know, erected as a token of thanksgiving. Every year, for three days, Venetians celebrate the passing of the Plague by making a pilgrimage across it, their children waving balloons about. Then it’s taken down again.’

Verity smiled at the fatter German, who was receiving less attention than her friend. And a bridge of boats, her father continued, was temporarily established every summer. ‘Again to give thanks. Another tradition since the Plague.’

The Americans who had been in the pensione came in and sat not far away. They ordered ice-creams, taking a long time about it, questioning the waiter in English as to whether they would come with added cream.

‘Oh, I remember Venice forty years ago,’ Mr Unwill said. ‘Of course, it’s greatly changed. The Yugoslavs come now, you know, in busloads.’ He issued a polite little laugh. ‘Not to mention the natives of your own fair land.’

‘Too many, I think,’ the prettier girl responded, grimacing.

‘Ah, ja, too many,’ agreed her companion.

‘No, no, no. You Germans travel well, I always say. Besides, to the Venetian a tourist’s a tourist, and tourists mean money. The trouble with the Yugoslavs, they apparently won’t be parted from it.’

It wasn’t usually his opinion that Germans travelled well; rather the opposite. He told the girls that at one time the Venetians had been capable of building a warship in a day. He explained about ghettoes, and said that in Venice it was the cats who feared the pigeons. He laughed in his genial way. He said:

‘That was a very clever remark you made last night, Ingrid. About waiters.’

‘It was Brigitta who said it first, I think.’

‘Oh, was it? Well, it’s quite amusing anyway. Now, what we really want to know is how long you’re staying at the pensione?’

‘Ja, just today,’ Ingrid said. ‘Tomorrow we have gone.’

‘Oh dear me, now that’s very sad.’

He would not, when the moment came, pay for the mandarinettos or the cake he was now pressing upon his guests. He would discover that he had left his wallet in some other pocket.

‘You must not spoil your looks, eh?’ he said when Ingrid refused the cake. His smile nudged her in a way he might have thought was intimate, but which Verity observed the girl registering as elderly. Brigitta had already been biting into a slice of cake when the remark was made about the losing of looks. Hastily she put it down. They must go, she said.

‘Go? Oh, surely not? No, please don’t go.’

But both girls were adamant. They had been too tired last night to see the Bridge of Sighs by lamplight and they must see that before they left. Each held out a hand, to Verity and then to her father. When they had gone Verity realized she hadn’t addressed a single word to either of them. A silence followed their departure, then Mr Unwill said in a whisper:

‘Those Americans seem rather nice, eh?’

He would hold forth to the Americans, as he had to the German girls, concentrating his attention on the daughter because she was the most attractive of the three. The mother was vulgarly dressed, the father shouted. In the presence of these people everything would be repeated, the painting of the Allemagna Express, the St Martin’s confections, the temporary bridges.

‘No,’ Verity said. ‘No, I don’t want to become involved with those Americans.’

He was taken aback. His mouth remained open after he’d begun to say something. He stared at her, slowly overcoming his bewilderment. For the second time that evening, he asked her if she felt all right. She didn’t reply. Time of the month, he supposed, this obvious explanation abruptly dawning on him, wretched for women. And then, to his very great surprise, he was aware that his daughter was talking about her decision, some months ago, to return to the family home.

‘ “My father’s on his own now,” I told him, “so I have given up the flat.” As soon as I had spoken I felt afraid. “We must be together,” is what I thought he’d say. He’d be alarmed and upset, I thought, because I’d broken the pattern of our love affair by causing this hiatus. But all he said was that he understood.’

They’d known, of course, about the wretched affair. Her mother had been depressed by it; so much time passing by, no sign of a resolution in whatever it was, no sign of marriage. Verity had steered all conversation away from it; when the subject was discreetly approached by her mother or her brothers she made it clear that they were trespassing on private property; he himself had made no forays in that direction, it not being his way. Astonishing it was, that she should wish to speak of it now.

‘I didn’t in the least,’ she said, ‘feel sorry for your loneliness. I felt sorry for myself. I couldn’t bear for a moment longer the routine love-making in that convenient flat.’

Feeling himself becoming hot, Mr Unwill removed his glasses and searched in the pockets of his blazer for his handkerchief. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He listened while Verity more or less repeated what she had said already. There had been sixteen years of routine love-making, ever since she was twenty-two. Her love affair had become her life, the routine punctuated by generous gifts and weekends in beautiful cities.

There was a silence. He polished one lens and then the other. He tightened the screws of the hinges with the useful little screwdriver in his penknife. Since the silence continued, eventually he said:

‘If you made an error in coming back to the house it can easily be rectified, old girl.’

‘Surely, I thought, those brief weekends would never be enough? Surely we would have to talk about everything again, now that there was no flat to go to?’ She spoke of the cities where the weekends had been spent: Bruges, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice. Bruges had been the first. In Bruges she had assumed, although he had not said so, that he would leave his wife. They had walked through chilly squares, they had sat for hours over dinner in the Hotel Duc du Bourgogne. In Paris, some time later, she had made the same assumption. He did not love his wife; when the children grew up he would leave her. By the time they visited Venice, the children had grown up. ‘Only just grown up,’ she said. ‘The last one only just, that summer.’

He did not say anything; the conversation was beyond his reach. He saw his daughter as an infant, a nurse holding a bundle towards him, the screwed-up face and tiny hands. She’d been a happy child, happy at school, happy with her friends. Young men had hung about the house; she’d gone to tennis-club dances and winter parties. ‘Love’s a disease sometimes,’ her mother had said, angrily, a year or so ago. Her mother had been cross because Verity always smiled so, pretending the happiness that was no longer there, determinedly optimistic. Because of the love affair, her mother had said also, Verity’s beauty had been wasted, seeming to have been uselessly visited upon her.

‘It wasn’t just a dirty weekend, you know, here in Venice. It’s never just that.’

‘Please, Verity. Please, now…’

‘He can’t bring himself to be unkind to his wife. He couldn’t be bad to a woman if he tried. I promise you, he’s a remarkable man.’

He began to expostulate but changed his mind. Everything he tried to say, even everything he felt, seemed clumsy. She stared beyond him, through the smoke from her cigarette, causing him to feel a stranger. Her silliness in love had made her carelessly harsh, selfish and insensitive because she had to think so much about herself. In a daughter who was not naturally silly, who had been gentle as a child, these qualities were painful to observe. Once she could have imagined what it was like for him to hear her refer so casually to dirty weekends; now she didn’t care if that hurt him or not. It was insulting to expect him to accept that the man was remarkable. It dismissed his intellect and his sense.

‘It was ridiculous,’ she said eventually, ‘to give up my flat.’

He made some protest when she asked the waiter for the bill, but she didn’t listen, paying the bill instead. He felt exhausted. He had sat in this very café with a woman who was dead; the man his daughter spoke of was still alive. It almost seemed the other way round. He would not have claimed a great deal for the marriage there had been: two people rubbing along, forgiving each other for this and that, one left alone to miss the nourishment of affection. Yet when the coffin had slipped away behind the beige curtain his grief had been unbearable and had remained so afterwards, for weeks and months, each day a hell.

‘I’m sorry for being a nuisance,’ she said before they rose from the table, and he wanted to explain to her that melancholy would have become too much if he allowed a city and its holiday memories to defeat him, that memories were insidious. But he didn’t say anything because he knew she would not listen to him properly. She could not help thinking badly of him; the harshness that had been bred in her prevented the allowances that old age demanded. Nor could he, because of anger, make allowances for her.

‘Hi!’ one of the Americans whom he’d thought it might be quite nice to know called out. They had finished their ice-creams and were preparing to leave also. All of them smiled but it was Verity, not he, who returned their greeting.

‘It’s I who should be sorry,’ he said on the Zattere. He’d been more gently treated than she: you knew where you were with death, in no way was it a confidence trick. He began to say that but changed his mind, knowing she would not wish to hear.

‘Heavens, how cold it has become!’ She hurried through the gathering fog, and so did he. The conversation was over, its loose ends hanging; each knew they would never be picked up. ‘Buona notte,’ the smart receptionist, all in green now, murmured in the hall of the pensione, and they bade her good-night in their different ways.

They lifted their keys from the rack beside the stairs and stepped over the sleeping cat on the bottom step. On the first-floor landing they said good-night, were briefly awkward because of what had passed between them, then entered their separate rooms. Slowly he prepared himself for bed, slowly undressing, slowly washing, folding his clothes with an old man’s care. She sat by her window, staring at the lights across the water, until the fog thickened and there was nothing left to see.