Deep and Silent Waters

She let him think so, knowing it was probably a mistake to talk to anyone, but finding the ordinary human contact reassuring.

‘Aren’t you cold, wearing just a body-stocking?’ she asked.

‘No, is fun. The carnivale is fun. You here for carnivale? Got a costume? I can hire for you.’

She shook her head. She knew Sebastian had hired one for her and for everyone else in the cast and crew.

‘You want I paint your face?’ the student asked. ‘Only forty thousand lira.’

‘You’re kidding! Forty thousand …’ Her brain wasn’t working fast enough.

‘Thirty dollars American.’

She had brought out a pile of lire with her, having locked her credit cards, cheque book and cash in a cupboard in her room at Ca’ d’Angeli. She was sure she had enough.

‘Okay,’ she said, and his olive-skinned face split open in a wide grin.

‘Half money now, half when I finish?’

She slid a hand inside her anorak and pulled out some cash, counted it into his hand and hoped he wouldn’t just run off with it, but he put it away carefully into a bum-bag and gestured at a stool.

‘Please. Sit.’

She sat on the low wooden stool, feeling the chill wind at her back, blowing off the Grand Canal straight from the lagoon. Any second now it would snow – and heavily.

The art student sat down on another stool, and indicated his palette of colours. ‘Please, choose. What you like?’

She ran her eyes over the range, chose a delicate mauve, a very pale green, silver and black.

‘Is good,’ said the boy, and a second later took her dark glasses off her nose.

His other hand came up to push back her hood but she grabbed it and held on firmly. ‘No, leave my hood!’

That surprised him but he didn’t argue: there weren’t many customers around in this weather. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Now close your eyes, please. I start with them.’

She did so obediently and felt the soft hairs of his brush begin to glide over her skin. Laura sighed, enveloped in the strange calm that always descended on her when she was in makeup.

It was so soothing to have someone touching you, soundlessly, gently, making no demands on you. She always felt at those times that she sank deep inside herself, leaving her mind free to wander. Today she thought about her parents, to whom she had talked before she left for Venice. They had told her that in Northumberland the weather was far worse than it was here, snow making the narrow, winding roads along the Wall impassable, imprisoning the family for days at a time. Yet she wished she was there: she loved the silences, or the sharp wail of the wind through bare thorn trees, the blue, blue sky on really cold days, the frosted white of the fields.

The art student said, ‘Okay, finished, you look now.’

He was holding up a mirror in a hand-painted wooden frame. Her eyes were framed now in triangles of silver and black, her forehead and cheeks seethed with mauve and green wavy lines, with dots of black here and there, the design continuing down to her chin.

‘Terrific!’ she said, then grasped for her few words of Italian. ‘Bella, molta bella, grazie tante.’

He beamed. ‘You like?’

‘I like.’ She got up and hunted in her pocket for more of her Italian banknotes. She gave him a tip on top of the rest of the agreed fee, and he thanked her eagerly, delighted.

‘Ciao!’ she said, flipping her fingers at him.

‘See you, baby,’ he said, in an exaggerated American drawl.

Laughing, Laura walked away, following the side canal, watching the first drifting flakes of snow falling, melting on the surface of the dark, oily water. Lights from windows high up in blank, brick walls were reflected there, too, shimmering, rippling, dissolving, never still, always changing, while up above in the late-afternoon sky a faint wraith of the sun gleamed between those heavy clouds. There were very few people about. No doubt they were all in St Mark’s Square, listening to music she could vaguely hear.

The winter wind blew across squares, made flagpoles rattle on hotels, tumbled Coke cans across the stone pavements, set up eddies of dust and paper in doorways, down narrow alleys. As she turned a corner she heard whispers in the dark, laughter from open windows, balconies. Someone was singing in a gondola on the Grand Canal: the sound echoed from stone walls and up from the secret depths of the water.

It was a longer walk than she had realised: she was getting tired and cold. She would have gone back but she had forgotten the way. Every time she turned a corner she hoped to see St Mark’s, but she never did. She was lost.