The Bedroom Assignment

It all took about three minutes. He had finished before Zoe managed to rouse herself from her stunned stillness. She had sat down on an antique wooden chair and was staring fixedly at a lavish bowl of fruit in the middle of a rather less antique coffee table.

Jay came out of the bedroom and looked at her shrewdly.

‘Get your walking shoes on,’ he said briskly. ‘We’ll do a circuit, so you know where to find things. Shake away the aeroplane blues.’

Zoe licked her lips. ‘Yes. I mean, what a good idea. Thank you.’

She gave herself several mental shakes and did as he said.

It was obvious that he knew Venice well. He took her to the Grand Canal first. But when he saw that she found the press of people almost overwhelming in the hot sunshine, he whisked her over a couple of little bridges, through a tiny square and into a herring-bone-paved side street.

To their left, the water lapped gently against stones that were green with age and watery moss. To their right, the decorated fac¸ade of a three-storeyed merchant’s house cast a warm ochre shade. A cat dozed beside a marble fountain. A shutter banged back. A small boy ran out of a house and was chased back inside. And all the while the water lifted and murmured like an animal padding beside them.

‘It’s amazing,’ said Zoe, awed.

Jay gave a long sigh of pleasure. He looked round. ‘Yes. There’s nowhere in the world like Venice.’

On the other side of the little canal a striped awning rolled down to shield the street from the evening sun. As if by magic, it seemed, a cake shop was appearing as the building seemed to wake out of its lazy afternoon doze. A woman came out and pushed back wooden shutters decorated with two china masks and a single elegant high-heeled shoe, to reveal a window of mouthwatering pastries. It was beautiful and strange and somehow menacing.

‘How can they make a cake shop look like a carnival assignation?’ said Zoe, pointing it out.

‘Style. And deception. The twin principles that Venice lives by,’ said Jay. He sounded pleased. ‘Always has. Let me show you.’

He took her through dark little streets, across tiny canals that looked like people’s private driveways and down main thoroughfares. The water was cool and mysterious beside their feet, like a lazy, watchful snake, Zoe thought. While the buildings were warm as toast to the touch. The colours were like every painting of Venice she had ever seen: buildings in cherry and terracotta and straw and the exact shade of crisp pastry. The landscape was studded with grey stone bridges and fountains and statues, like diamonds on a rich fabric. And through it all the sinewy, silent water.

At last they came back to the Grand Canal again. By that time Zoe’s head was spinning.

‘I’m lost. I thought the Grand Canal was back there.’ She waved a hand behind them.

Jay looked even more pleased. ‘It is. We’re on the great loop of a meander. Now we cross the Accademia Bridge here, and we’ll go and see the Big Attraction.’

The Piazza San Marco was full of people again. But Zoe did not care. She sank onto a rattan chair in one of the outdoor cafés and sighed with exquisite satisfaction.

‘I never knew—’ she said in wonder.

‘You can see just as much in books, of course. Or television. But you don’t sense it,’ agreed Jay. He summoned a waiter with his usual ease and ordered English tea. ‘Later we’ll have Bellinis. I always like to leave cocktails until after dark when I’m here.’

Zoe did not quibble with that. ‘You seem to know Venice very well.’

He smiled. It was one of his real smiles, not the up-and-under sexy stuff that she saw him use on clients or difficult women. It felt as if he had let his guard down and was letting her see him. More than see him. Warm her hands at the flame of his intelligence.

‘Venice was the first city that reconciled me to Europe.’

‘What?’ She was genuinely startled.

He stretched his long legs out in front of him, screwing up his eyes. She thought he watched the tourists as if they were a mildly interesting form of wildlife.

‘I’m only half-European, you know. The later flowering half. I was born in India. Kerala. That’s where my mother comes from. We lived there with my grandfather until I was seven.’