Next day she returned for the last time to the little pink house in the sunny, dusty, drowsing square on the Dorsoduro. Alex and Susan-Jane had packed up all their possessions and seen them dispatched in a van to Monte Carlo, where they would be stored for a few days until their owners arrived to move back into their Monte Carlo home.
That evening, Alex and Susan-Jane were having a party for their friends on their final day in Venice, and Antonia was kept busy most of the afternoon helping them get the house ready, cleaning and polishing, moving furniture around to clear the rooms for a large influx of people, preparing food, chopping and washing salad, and making a variety of easy-to-eat dishes which could be pre-cooked and re-heated, like paella, quiches, pizzas and curried chicken.
When everything was ready they all slumped into chairs and sipped some white wine before they went up to have baths and dress.
‘It’s so crazy, having a party the night before we leave!’ Susan-Jane chuckled. ‘We’re going to feel like death tomorrow, and we have that long drive ahead of us.’
‘But we won’t have to clear up here, because I’ve got a local cleaning sevice coming in to deal with the house!’ Alex pointed out. ‘And we don’t have to drive all the way to Monte Carlo; we can stop if we feel tired and book in at a hotel on the way for a night. Relax, darling; there’s no problem we can’t solve.’
‘You just love having parties!’ his wife accused, making a laughing face at him.
‘Guilty!’ he complacently admitted. ‘So do you!’
‘We should have had this one a week ago, though!’
‘Oh, that just means an anticlimax, knowing you’ve got another week before you actually leave! No, the best time to have a party is the night before you leave. Then you get up and go!’
Susan-Jane finished her wine and looked at her watch. ‘Me first for the bath!’ She got up and shot towards the stairs and Alex got up too and lunged after her, but she was too quick for him and vanished upstairs, laughing. Alex came back and sat down, grinning at Antonia.
‘She always has to be first in the bath! That gives her more time to get dressed, and she does love to dawdle over dressing for a party; she changes her mind half a dozen times over what dress to wear, what make-up, how to do her hair and so on! You’d think she was deciding the fate of nations, the time she takes to make up her mind.’
‘The end product is worth it, though,’ Antonia said warmly. ‘She always looks gorgeous!’
‘That she does.’ Alex grinned at her. ‘So do you. What are you going to wear tonight? Something wild and sexy or something elegant and sophisticated?’
She gave him a wry look, knowing that neither description ever fitted her. The last thing she wanted to do was look wild or sexy. She preferred not to attract male attention in that way; it was far too risky.
What she had been doing for the last two years was melting into the background as much as possible, trying to be invisible, especially to men. As for elegance or sophistication, much as she admired both qualities in other women, she had never fooled herself that she possessed either. She wasn’t the type, neither tall enough nor with the right cool manner.
‘I brought my carnival dress, actually,’ she said, and Alex Holtner’s face lit up.
‘That one! I’d forgotten it—you almost never wear it; but you must, tonight. It’s wonderful! Nobody will be able to take their eyes off you.’
‘Off my costume, you mean!’ she drily said, knowing the effect it always had.
It was a dress Alex had bought her here in Venice, not long after they’d arrived. It had been in a sale at half-price, having been designed to be worn for the Venice Carnival, which took place in the dark weeks of late February, when the city was half empty, grey, chilly and wet. The wild explosion of the carnival lit the cold streets for a week, bringing in tourists at the dead season of the year, and thousands of art students from all over Italy, and, indeed, Europe, who came to enjoy the fun and make pocket-money by doing body-painting in the streets for other students who weren’t able to do it themselves. The most extraordinary designs were worn around Venice that week—young people in hand-painted masks, wearing ‘body’ costumes like pale second skins, which were then painted with wild zigzags of colour—orange and gold and black and scarlet—making them look like alien life forms. On really cold days they wore a warm cape which flew around them as they walked, leaving their body-painting visible to passers-by.
Alex Holtner, his wife and Antonia had just missed the carnival, arriving a couple of weeks later, but carnival masks and costumes had still been around in the shops at reduced prices, and Antonia had stopped in her tracks as she’d passed a shop not far from the Rialto market and seen a silver and black dress taking up the whole of the shop window.
Although it was half-price, it was still far too expensive for her, and she would have walked on, but Alex and Susan-Jane had seen the glow of delight in her face, the coveting expression.
They had exchanged a glance, then Susan-Jane had urged her, ‘Go in and try it on!’
She had demurred, laughing, shaking her head, but Susan-Jane had firmly led her into the shop and asked to have the dress taken out of the window so that she could try it on. The owner had looked Antonia up and down, with a thoughtful expression.
‘Yes, it will fit her, I think,’ she had said, and Antonia had been carefully helped into the costume in a cubicle. Seeing herself in a mirror had stunned her. She
