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‘And you’d know, would you? I suppose you’ve had your nose in a guidebook ever since we arrived. Your kind always does.’
His derisory tone stung, but Ella refused to cave in.
‘Actually, I’ve visited Venice before. My stepmother has business connections here.’ She knew she sounded prim and stuffy and, indeed, almost arrogant–she certainly wouldn’t have spoken to anyone else like this–but somehow Oliver Charters brought out the worst in her.
‘And that puts me in my place, does it? Me being from the East End?’
‘I was simply trying to save time,’ Ella told him truthfully,
They were standing in St Mark’s Square now, its wide expanse for once empty not just of visitors but also of the pigeons for which it was so famous. Even the cafés that lined the square had removed their outside tables and chairs, and the whole place looked grey and miserable, not somewhere to shoot high-summer fashion at all.
‘OK then, so where’s the famous sighing bridge everyone goes on about?’ Oliver challenged her.
‘It’s called the Ponte dei Sospiri,’ Ella answered him. ‘People refer to it as the Bridge of Sighs because it’s the bridge that prisoners used to have to cross. It’s this way, I think.’ Ella hurried him past the sign that read ‘Piazza San Marco’, hoping that Oliver wouldn’t ask her if she could speak Italian in that sarcastic voice of his, and then along the waterfront back the way they’d come, to the Rio del Palazzo. Standing on the bridge that crossed it, she pointed down the narrow canal to the enclosed bridge further down.
‘You mean that’s it?’ Oliver demanded. ‘How the hell am I supposed to photograph models standing on that?’
‘You can’t,’ Ella told him, but he wasn’t listening.
Instead, he was looking through the lens of his camera, finally telling her in a peremptory voice, ‘Right, I want you to stand here.’
‘Here’ was the middle of the bridge.
Thankful that there was no one else about, Ella did as he had instructed her, her self-consciousness increasing when he started to lift his camera and look through it.
‘No, not like that. You look like a block of wood. Relax, and look towards that sighing bridge, or whatever it’s supposed to be, and think about something sad. And get rid of the umbrella, and the beret.’
‘I’ll get wet,’ Ella protested.
‘So?’
She hated him, she decided, as he took the umbrella from her, quickly snatching off her beret herself and putting it into her bag. She really, really hated him. She looked towards the Bridge of Sighs and shivered, trying to imagine what it must have felt like to watch someone you loved being taken over that bridge to the cells, convicted to spend the rest of his life there.
‘Come on, this is no time to start looking all moony. We’ve got work to do.’
Ella gasped in indignation but before she could point out that he had told her to look
‘sad’, Oliver was continuing, ‘Now we want a church, but not just any church. It’s got to look right.’
He wanted a church. Venice had any number of them. Ella gritted her teeth.
‘Any particular kind of church you want?’
‘Yeah, a photogenic one.’
In the end she found him three churches that met with his approval, along with five bridges and, most humiliating of all, as far as Ella was concerned, a stray gondolier, whom Oliver persuaded to hand Ella into his gondola where she had to recline against one of the cushions whilst Oliver snapped busily.
At last it was over, the light was fading, and Ella was wet and cold. Her knitted suit was clinging uncomfortably to her body and would be ruined, and Ella had been all too conscious of the look the gondolier had given her breasts as he had handed her into his craft.
‘Right, come on, let’s get back,’ Oliver announced.
He’d got some excellent shots, and although he didn’t really want to admit it, Ella’s knowledge of Venice had given him some locations he doubted he would ever have found by himself.
Ella was hurrying, head down, along one of the city’s narrow streets with Oliver in front of her, when he suddenly turned round and grabbed hold of her, pushing her back against the wall of the building behind her, just in time to prevent her from being hit by the cyclist coming the other way at speed.
The anger that had filled her when he had grabbed hold of her vanished, to be replaced by relief when she realised how close she had come to being hurt, and then a dizzy shakiness.
‘Are you OK?’
