The Collected Stories

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.’