The Venetian Playboy’s Bride

to the music from a four-piece orchestra. Dulcie crumbled up a small cake and fed it to some of the thousands of pigeons that thronged the visitors. The sun hadn’t reached its height, making it no more than pleasantly warm, and she leaned back, eyes closed, overwhelmed by a blissful content that she could never remember feeling before.

She opened her eyes at last, turning to him, smiling, and caught an unguarded expression on his face. His feelings were there, open and defenceless. It was a look not merely of love but almost of adoration, with nothing held back, and it took her breath away. Beneath his smiles and jokes there was this?

Then a sound disturbed the pigeons and they rose up with a wild beating of wings, thousands of them, darkening the sky, making the air swirl. Her head spun, though whether it was the pigeons or what she had just seen Dulcie was too confused to know.

And when the flight was over and she could see him again she found that he was rising, gathering bags and saying things about leaving. She managed to take a bag in the teeth of his protests, and they wandered away along the waterfront until it was time to turn inland where some of the calles were so narrow that she had to walk behind him, but still with her hand clasped in his.

In her mind she could still see his face, transported with joy yet with a strange look of peace, like a man who’d come home and found it a blissful place. She wanted to close her eyes against that look, and she wanted to see it all her life.

‘What is it?’ he asked, looking back at her. ‘You’re lagging behind. Are you tired?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘I’ve kept you out too long.’ He slipped an arm about her shoulders. The smile he gave her was almost like those she’d seen before, just friendly. But behind it she could see the shadow of the other look. She slipped an arm about his waist and let him guide her home through streets of gold.

CHAPTER SIX

HE ORDERED her to rest in front of the television while he unpacked the food in his tiny kitchen, and made her a cup of tea. Remembering his strictures about English coffee she was half looking forward to returning the compliment, but the tea was excellent.

She spent the afternoon at work in the kitchen while he helped with the ‘menial tasks’, fetched and carried and generally did as he was told, but with an air of meekness that belied the wicked glint in his eyes.

Several times she glanced at him, wondering if she would catch the intense look that had seemed to suggest so much, but he had himself under command now. Except that often she sensed him watching her too.

But he had his timetable, she knew that now. While she was officially an invalid he would act like her brother. And after that she would be gone, she remembered with a little ache.

In the early evening they sat down to eat and her meal was a triumph. He approached it cautiously, as if to say that he’d heard about English cooking but was prepared to be kind. He ended up scraping the plate and asking for more.

Afterwards he settled her on the sofa with a glass of prosecco, while he prepared the coffee. When he returned she was reclining peacefully on the sofa, admiring the masks on his wall.

‘Ah, you’re looking at my zanni,’ he said, setting the cups on a low table.

‘Zanni?’

‘It means clowns. In English you would say they are “zany”. Most of the masks there are clowns, Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, Pierrette, but there are others too because masks have always been so important in Venice, right back to the thirteenth century. Ladies of the night would offer themselves in a variety of “faces”, aristocrats who wanted to indulge themselves anonymously. And sometimes the “ladies of pleasure” and the “great ladies” were the same. There were couples who grew very amorous-then removed the masks and discovered they’d been married for years.’

‘All very disreputable,’ she said.

‘A lot of it was, which was why at different times in Venice’s history masks have been banned. They concealed a little too much.’

‘You make it sound as though masks were Venice’s exclusive preserve, but surely every civilisation has appreciated them.’

He shrugged. ‘Certainly, you’ll find them in other countries, but it was the Venetians who turned them into an art form.’

‘But why? Why you and not the others?’ she asked, genuinely interested.

‘Perhaps it’s something to do with the Venetian character, a certain fluidity.’

‘What exactly do you mean, fluidity?’

He grinned. ‘Unkind people have called it unscrupulous. We are not a solid, respectable race. How can we be?’ He indicated the canal beneath the window. ‘We don’t live on solid foundations. We travel through streets that move beneath us. Our city is sinking into the lagoon, and it has changed hands so often through the centuries that life itself isn’t solid. We live on our wits, and we’ve learned a certain-let’s say-adaptability. And the best way to be adaptable, is to keep a variety of masks available.’

‘A variety?’

‘One is never enough. Over the centuries we’ve played so many roles. We’ve conquered the surrounding areas, and in our turn we’ve been conquered. Venetians have been both masters and servants, and we know that each is just a role to be played, with its proper mask. Come and look more closely.’

She did so, wondering at the variety of expressions that could be encompassed by a little painted cardboard.

‘There are so many. It’s incredible.’

‘There are as many as there are expressions on the human face, or types of the human heart.’

‘Then how is anyone to know who you really are?’

‘Because sooner or later each person dons the mask that reveals the truth.’

‘But which truth?’ she asked quickly, ‘when the truth itself is always shifting?’

He made a sudden alert movement. ‘You understand. Something told me that you would. Of course, you’re right. I can only say that when people’s faces are hidden they are free to become their true selves.’

‘Then their selves shift also, and they become another self,’ she pressed him. It was somehow important.

‘Of course they do,’ he countered. ‘Because people turn into different people all the time. Are you the same person you were last year, last week, the day before you came to Venice?’

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘Not at all.’

He took down a mask with a very long nose and held it before his face. ‘Pantalone, the merchant, greedy for profit.’ He changed the mask for one with a shorter nose, but ugly. ‘Pulcinella, he’s a bit of a thug. In England you call him Mr Punch.’ Another change to a broad, plump mask. ‘The doctor, spouts yards of pseudo science.’

He whisked another mask off the wall and held it up so that his eyes looked through the slits. It was uncannily like his own face.

‘Harlequin,’ he said. ‘His name derives from Hellecchino, which means “little devil”. He’s like a rubber ball, always bouncing back: cunning and inventive, but not as clever as he thinks he is, and his mistakes always bring him to the edge of disaster. He wears a multi-coloured costume because his kind friends have given him their old cast-offs to sew together.’

‘Poor fellow,’ she said laughing. ‘And are you like him?’

‘What makes you say that?’ he asked quickly.

‘You say more about him than the others.’

‘True. Yes, I suppose I do. I hadn’t realised. But that’s my point. A man may be Harlequin today and Pantalone tomorrow.’

‘You, the greedy merchant?’

‘Well, a merchant anyway.’ Almost to himself, he added, ‘With a pipe and slippers.’

He saw her puzzled look and hastened to change the subject. ‘Anyway, it’s good to see you laugh. You don’t