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Her parents were never unkind; they were charming to her, generous, took care that she had what she wanted, but Antonia had known in her heart of hearts that they did not love her.
She was an interruption to their otherwise important lives, and although, for a short while after she came home from Italy two years ago, they had tried hard to bridge the gap between her and them, appalled and overwhelm
ed by what had happened to her, by then it had been too late. Antonia had not wanted them.
She had retreated into silence herself; small and pale and needing only to avoid being noticed, she had put up a barrier nobody could cross, and slowly her parents had given up, drifted back to their own lives, their own obsessions.
Antonia had been left alone with her claustrophobic dreams, her haunted days and nights. She had stopped eating; she was shrinking, slowly turned into a ghost of herself.
Then her mother’s brother, Uncle Alex, had come to visit, had taken one look at her and been horrified. ‘You can’t go on like this!’ he had said. ‘You’ve lost so much weight you look like a child of twelve! And that’s how you’re dressing, too. My God, can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? You’re trying to pretend it never happened; you’ve gone back into childhood to escape it. You’ve got arms and legs like little sticks; you’re anorexic. Now don’t lie about it! I’ve got eyes in my head; I can see it. If your parents weren’t so obsessed with themselves, they would see it, too. We’re going to have to do something about it. You must confront it, go back to Italy, face up to what happened.’
‘No, I can’t!’ she had said, white-faced, and gone on saying it for weeks, but Uncle Alex was dogged. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and eventually he had talked her on to the plane, back to Florence, to pick up her studies again.
Her parents had approved, relieved to see her go. With her out of sight and far away they needn’t feel they should be worrying about her, doing something about her. They needn’t feel guilty any more.
That was one reason why she had come back to Italy, in fact—so that her parents need not look so uneasy when they saw her, so that they need not feel guilty. Her other reason was Uncle Alex’s distress at the sight of her. He made her feel he cared.
‘What are you thinking about to make you look like that?’ Patrick asked, and she started.
‘Nothing.’
He knew she lied, and watched her, his blue eyes narrowed. He wished he could see inside her head, but maybe he would hate what he saw. Something terrible must have happened to this girl to make her look the way she did.
‘So when did you come back to Italy?’ he asked, and she sighed.
‘Uncle Alex and Susan-Jane rented a flat in Florence for six months, and I shared it with them, and finished my art course. Then when their lease ran out they left and I stayed on, in a smaller flat somewhere else.’
They had made her go to classes, filled the flat with people, got her eating again—lots of pasta with cream and eggs—had stayed until they were certain that Antonia was going to be able to manage on her own. Nobody in Florence had known about what had happened to her; that had made it easier, and being away from her parents had helped too. Uncle Alex and Susan-Jane cared about her, and that had worked a sort of magic.
‘They’re great,’ she said. ‘I love Uncle Alex, and Susan-Jane is great fun, not like an aunt, more like a sister.’
Patrick remembered the cartoonist’s face in the villa that night as the police were hustling him past the open door into the huge lounge. If Alex Holtner could have got his hands on him at that moment he would have killed him, he thought. Yes, Alex Holtner loved his niece, no doubt about that.
‘Do they still live in Bordighera?’
‘No, they sold that villa; they bought a big three-bedroomed flat in Monte Carlo—that’s their home base now—but they’re born wanderers; they travel all the time, right around the world, because, of course, Uncle Alex can work anywhere. He’s been working here—he rented this house for the summer.’
Patrick gazed at the little strawberry-pink-painted house with its white ironwork balcony over which a white awning stretched, shading the windows on the upper floor of the house, and coveted it. He was living in a tiny flat high up in a shabby old house, in a back street of Cannaregio, a district where once the canal had wound between tall green bamboo canes, long since vanished.
His room was filled with a smell of cooking from the flats below, overrun with bugs of one kind or another, swelteringly hot during the day and stuffy at night.
‘Lucky Uncle Alex, nice to be a rich cartoonist,’ he drily said. ‘It’s beautiful. Are they here now?’
She hesitated, her lashes drooping over her eyes, half tempted to lie, then shook her head, but didn’t tell him that Alex and Susan-Jane were not even in Venice, that they had flown to London to have a business meeting with Alex’s agent, who was visiting England. They had invited Antonia to go, too, but she had decided to stay and have a few quiet days alone.
‘Probably just as well,’ Patrick grimaced. ‘The last time I saw him he looked as if he would like to kill me.’
She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid he was very angry, and he’s always wished he had had a chance to say sorry to you, but you left without going back to the villa.’
‘Yes, I felt it would be wiser—I was pretty sore about the whole episode at the time. I might have turned nasty if I had run into your uncle; I was in no mood to accept apologies.’
Antonia gave him a searching sideways look. ‘Why did you break your contract with Rae Dunhill? I felt awful about that—it wasn’t her fault!’
He groaned. ‘I must admit, I regretted that afterwards. I had always liked Rae, and I enjoyed working with her—but she had believed I was guilty, and I found that hard to forgive; I felt I never wanted to see her again. It takes a long time to get over these things.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and they both stared at each other in silence, around them the tranquillity of the garden, of the streets surrounding it.
This district of Venice was called the Dorsoduro, which meant ‘hard-back’; built on a hard clay base, it was a labyrinth of winding little streets, full of small private houses, built for workers long ago, later inhabited by the English during the period when there was a large English colony in Venice. The area stretched between the Accademia and the church of Santa Maria della Salute, which was the first glimpse of Venice to greet returning ships.
