The Honeymoon (3 page)

“I’m looking forward to meeting any man called ‘Bunney,’ ” Johnnie said now. “He must be a very industrious bunny.” He smiled. She was glad for the smile.

Their meal finished, they went out on the balcony again and sat together on the bench. Their bodies didn’t touch. His big, masculine hand rested on the velvet cushion, but he didn’t reach for hers.

The sky was a great depth of smoky darkness. The waters of the canal were black, punctuated by the wavering reflection of the lights on the embankment. From behind them came the tactful clinking of dishes and silverware, the chambermaid clearing away supper.

The girl finished, then asked,
“Signora, le preparo il letto?”

“Yes, I’m coming,” Marian said, and rose. Johnnie was summoned out of his trance and he stood up and bent and kissed her hand. She brushed his cheek briefly with her fingertips.

“You’ll sleep well tonight from the journey,” she said. “It’ll be quiet. You’ll feel better in the morning.” Freed from your new, mysterious, unnamed sorrow, she thought.

He looked downcast. “I hope so. I feel as if I’m incapable of sleep. It’s an art lost to me. Something other people know how to do, but not me. Perhaps there’s something wrong with my brain?” There was a tone of desperation in his voice. “Something physiological?”

“There’s nothing wrong,” she said. “You’ve just been overexcited. You’ve taken on too much. Now that it’s all over, it’s time for you to rest.”

“I hope so.”

“Perhaps you should take something?” she said.

“I’ve tried. It doesn’t seem to help. I’ll have a whiskey.” She had noticed that he had been drinking more.

“But you mustn’t have too much!”

“I’m careful.”

The chambermaid was watching them with big round eyes. Marian hoped she didn’t understand much English. She must have witnessed all forms of behavior from tourists in the intimacy of their hotel rooms — heated and romantic conversations, bouts of quarreling and coldness.

Johnnie kissed her hand again. She sensed he wanted her to leave. Because he was unhappy, she thought, and wanted to concentrate on his unhappiness, whatever it was, to try and survive it, focus all his energies on the effort.

She left him standing forlornly in the dim light.

In the bedchamber, the maid turned back the bed and helped Marian undress to her chemise and drawers, then lifted her nightgown down over her head.

“Vorrebbe un po’ d’acqua d’arancia, la mia donna?”
she asked.

“Thank you,” Marian said. The girl poured the orange water from a silver pitcher by the bed. As she took the glass, the maid glanced at her hands.
“Le sue mani sono belle, la mia donna.”

“Thank you, that’s very sweet.” She spread out her fingers. People always noticed her hands, her fingers were long
and slender, good for the piano, the skin delicate, nearly transparent. Her hands and her feet were the only beautiful things about her. Whenever she complained to George about her looks, he’d just laugh at her. “Oh, stop, Polly. You’re beautiful! And I know it even if you don’t.” He’d kept it up for all those years, not once through nearly a quarter century together slipping and giving in to her. “You don’t look like a dolly,” he said. “That’s all. I know what it’s like to love a little dolly,” he said, “and it didn’t please me at all.” His wife, Agnes, he meant, who’d been so pretty in her youth, a fair, bright-complexioned girl when they’d married, but now a round, fat little thing, her body worn and stretched from giving birth to eight children.

“One hand’s bigger than the other,” she told the maid. “From churning butter when I was a girl. I’m a country girl,” she said. “I grew up on a farm. What’s your name, dear?”

“Gerita, Madame.”

“ ‘Gerita.’ I don’t think I’ve heard that name.”

“From ‘Margherita,’ ” she said.

“And how old are you?”

“Diciassette.”

“Seventeen,” Marian repeated. “Where did you learn to take care of people so kindly?”

“
Mia madre
. She is ill. I look after her when I not here at the hotel.”

“I’m so sorry,” Marian said. “What is the matter with your mama?”

The girl touched her breast.
“È malate di cancro,”
she said.

“Cancer. My poor mother had that too.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “
Sua madre era malata
? Your mama also? Did she, your mama, die?”

“Si, cara.”
She looked at the girl. “But your mama will be all right. I’m sure of it.”

The girl crossed herself. “
O, mio dio
 …” Then, “Would Madame like the mosquito net?”

“Yes, please.” Fever was always a danger here.

She climbed into bed and the girl drew the netting around it, then curtsied and exited through the thick, paneled doors, closing them softly behind her.

She couldn’t fall asleep. She watched the play of water reflected on the wall opposite. From below on the canal came the sounds of shouting and singing.

What was he doing in the next room? Had he gone to bed? Was he still out on the balcony, looking down at the water, beset by his worry? The manager’s tactlessness had upset him so. She felt a sudden longing to put her arms around him, to comfort him, heal him with her love, make him better.

In the darkness and privacy, she remembered being with George in the Hôtel de la Ville. The seclusion and freedom of travel was liberating, the mosquito netting around them an added privacy. That night they’d made love not once, but twice. When it was over, he’d said to her, “Not bad for a man of forty-seven.”

“To me, you’ll always be young,” she’d told him, placing her arm across his chest and resting her head on his shoulder.

Now, at last, came a wonderful sleep, as if she were on the gondola again, rocking and swaying gently in the water.

At midnight, she came to consciousness briefly when the bells of San Marco sounded, clanging and echoing off the empty Piazza next door, then she fell asleep again.

Somewhere in the premorning hours came the dream.

S
he was a little girl and they’d sent her away to boarding school because her mother couldn’t take care of her anymore. It was the depths of winter, she was so cold, the damp seeping into her very bones. She was trying to get to the fire, but a group of girls was standing in front of it. “I’m freezing,” she cried. “Please — let me in!” But they were bigger than she was, and they’d gotten there first and they were hogging the warmth, and she was forced to hang back behind them, shivering so hard that her teeth were chattering and her bones were rattling in her skin.

Here in Venice, she woke up from the dream, and instinctively, half asleep, she moved as she always did when she had a bad dream, toward the other side of the bed, seeking him. Contact with his body magically soothed all her terrors and put her to sleep like a drug.

But now she grasped only air. Next to her the bed was empty, the wide mattress white in the moonlight.

She’d had this same dream again and again for more than fifty years, but in the past, George had been there to comfort her. Instead, the memories of her childhood came pouring back, the loneliness returned. She was unable to sleep.

The dream came from when she was at Miss Lathom’s. She remembered it as vividly as if she were still five years
old, the harshness of the place was imprinted forever upon her brain. She was the youngest girl in the school. That first night, after lights out, she’d lain in her iron cot amid the long rows of girls and the homesickness had spread through her body like a dull, wet ache. What had she done to make them send her there? Was she such a bad girl? Why had her mother made her go away? She’d tried so hard to be good and not to be any trouble.

Lying there in her cot, she started to cry. Her sobs and sniffles punctuated the darkness. “Shhh! Be quiet!
Do
shut up!” From up and down the aisles had come angry whispers. She tried to hold her sobs in, but they kept escaping from her.

Her sister, Chrissey, was asleep in the cot next to her. Chrissey was five years older than she was. She climbed out of her bed into Chrissey’s, and she snuggled up against her bony body, and when Chrissey felt her there, she half woke up and sleepily took her in her arms and patted her. “It’s all right, Polly,” she whispered. “It’s all right, dear … Hush now … don’t cry …”

In the ensuing days, she’d held herself proudly, haughtily, apart from the rest of the girls. She followed Chrissey around and refused to look at anyone.

Her father had promised that he’d come on Friday afternoon at five o’clock, to take them home for the weekend. At four o’clock sharp, she went to the parlor so she could watch for him from the front window. She fixed her eyes on the driveway, willing him to come with all the force of her mind.

At last she caught sight of the gig and she dashed out the front door, breaking the rule that no pupil could leave the building without permission. She ran across the driveway to him and threw her arms around his legs. “Aye, little
wench!” he said, and laughed. “You’ll be knocking me over!” He picked her up and kissed her. The stubble on his face pricked her cheeks, and she smelled the reassuring smell of his old tobacco and the fleshy scent of his hair. She would keep that big, strong man from ever leaving her again.

She’d been sent away because her mother had given birth to twins. She was very young, but she remembered everything, every moment was burned on her memory. (George once said, “You never miss anything within the curl of your eyelash, do you?”) She remembered the sounds of the birth, sitting at the foot of the stairs, listening to her mother’s cries coming from behind the bedroom door, while Aunt Mary rushed past her carrying bowls of water and sheets. Her mother was suffering so, she wanted to help her, to save her from dying, to stop her pain. “You can’t go in there,” Aunt Mary told her. “You go downstairs now.” She didn’t, cowering in the shadows of the stairs, hoping no one would notice her there.

Then … a final, terrible scream. Aunt Mary emerged from the room. “There’s two of ’em,” she said briskly. “They’ll not survive.”

“I want to see Mama.”

“Not now,” she said. “Run along now.”

The door to the room closed and opened, there was a momentary shaft of light from inside, then it closed again.

Downstairs, her mother’s other sisters were seated by the fire. They had all come for the birth. Aunt Elizabeth, obsessed with illness, her own and those of other people, had been sitting through the cries from above, weeping and worrying and useless. Aunt Ann, thin and sallow-skinned, who had married the richest of the husbands, was useless
too. She didn’t want to dirty her elegant silk dress by helping out with the birth. Only Aunt Mary was of any help.

Her father was out on his rounds as manager of the Arbury Estate, and as usual Chrissey was a good girl, bringing Aunt Mary the tea for her mother, sitting quietly on her stool by the fire with her patchwork when she wasn’t needed. Their brother, Isaac, kept away from the house, running wild, out fishing at Round Pool, or in the barn with his rabbits.

“I want to see Mama,” she said again.

Aunt Mary let out a rough sigh. “One minute only,” she said.

She entered the bedroom as quietly as she could, afraid to make a sound for fear of somehow hurting her. The air was stale and thick with smells, the only sound the crackling of the fire in the grate. On the high bed her mother lay, her face to the wall.

Near the fire stood a hooded cradle. She went up to it. Inside were two tiny creatures, smaller than her dolls, swaddled in white, with their eyes swollen closed. They looked barely human, but they were moving, their little faces scrunched up, panting, struggling for air. She could hear grunts and feeble mewlings coming from them.

She was terrified to touch them, repulsed, as she’d been at the runts of the litters of puppies born in the barn, ignored by their mothers because the mothers knew they were going to die, while the healthy ones suckled ravenously and kicked the runts out of the group.

“What’s their names?” she asked Aunt Mary.

“Them’s William and Thomas,” Aunt Mary said crisply. “Don’t trouble Mama now.” But she couldn’t stay away. She
had to see her. She approached the bed and her mother, sensing the movement, winced and turned her face toward her. With difficulty, for she was still small, Marian climbed up onto the bed. Her mother’s face, once lovely with its delicate features, was pale and yellowish now, and there was dried blood in her blond curls and on her nightcap. Her eyelashes were transparent, her lips were chapped. She looked at Marian foggily, as if she didn’t recognize her, as if she were an intrusion, a stranger coming to bother her.

“I love you, Mama,” she whispered.

She reached across the bed for her mother’s hand and took it. Her mother’s fingers were icy cold. She squeezed them gently so as not to hurt her.

“Do you love me, Mama?” she asked.

Her mother gave her a faint, pained smile, it was obviously an effort. She felt a pressure from her mother’s hand on her own. She went to kiss her cheek, but then her mother turned her face to the wall again.