Urban Venus (10 page)

Vincenzo settles me at the table and doesn’t seem to notice that I’m more than a little uncomfortable, or at least if he does, he doesn’t let it bother him. He probably likes the feeling of control that unnerving a woman brings. With a quick click of his fingers, champagne is promptly popped and the waiter is pouring it expertly into two flutes.

‘
To Anglo-Italian relations,’ he toasts, with something of a self-satisfied grin, and I fear he isn’t referring to some football match or other. His smugness implies that, for him, the outcome of the evening is a foregone conclusion, and I will be in his bed before the night is over. Well, no way.

‘
To the success of your exhibition,’ I counter-reply, hoping to bring the conversation back to where I want it, on safer territory. ‘Did you make many sales?’ I ask, hoping that if I get him talking about himself and his work, his two favourite topics of conversation, then he will be off and running.

‘
I did pretty well actually, and got a couple of commissions out of it too, which is great,’ he starts. Fantastic, crank him up and off he goes, as planned. I try to stop looking worried, un-tense my shoulders which are currently up around my ears, and start looking interested as he goes into detail about which paintings he has managed to secure sales for, and where the commissions are to be based.

‘
Bologna, that sounds brilliant,’ I respond enthusiastically, and he launches off into detail on what this particular commission involves.

‘
Not till next summer, though,’ he adds. ‘I can’t neglect my duties here, and the university would never give me time off. Besides which, I have too many students I care about too deeply to leave behind.’ He gazes at me like a love-sick puppy, and I make sure my hands are firmly in my lap so he can’t reach out and grab one of them across the table.

I try again to get him to tell me some more about Bologna, but now as I attempt to nudge the conversation in the direction of his own life, he turns the subject back to me. This isn’t part of the plan at all. It’s going to be hard work and we’ve only just had our starters. So at this juncture I decide to tell him about something I had planned to keep to myself, at least for now – my dreams.

Vincenzo sits with his chin on his upturned hands, raptly attentive, whilst I tell him about the dreams. In recounting them to a third party I find I remember more detail, and I start to see some sort of jumbled story emerging. But who is this girl, and why is she trying to get into my head to tell her story? I’m not into the supernatural in a big way, I don’t believe in ghosts, and I’ve never really paid much attention to people who claim to have had a ‘past life’ and all that sort of mumbo-jumbo stuff. Or so I’d thought until this moment. But right here and right now, telling this girl’s story for her, I feel that there should be some sort of explanation as to why she is ‘haunting’ me, which really is exactly what she is doing. Have I been ‘chosen’ to have these dreams? I don’t see loads of other people becoming semi-narcoleptic the moment they set foot in that room, so why me?

Vincenzo gives off the impression that he has been listening seriously to my stories and my attempts to interpret them, but then suddenly he gazes around the room impatiently, as though he’s bored, and clicks his fingers (I hate it when people do that in restaurants – it’s so rude!) for the waiter to come over.

‘
More champagne for the Signorina!’ he commands, as I protest that, no, thank you, I have had quite enough and am perfectly happy with my San Pellegrino sparkling water for the rest of the meal.

‘
Well, what a fantastic imagination you have,
cara
,’ he exclaims, in something of a patronising tone of voice, once the waiter has been sent packing with his tail between his legs. ‘Whoever would have imagined you could come up with all that just by looking at a painting? You should put your ideas onto canvas, you know, then maybe this ‘girl’ of yours will become more real to you. But honestly, all this talk about you being ‘chosen’, I mean….. come on!’

I hadn’t expected him to be so dismissive and I am cut to the quick, feeling very silly. It’s too late now, I have told him all about it, so whatever he thinks of me, it’s too bad. With any luck it will dampen his ardour, which has to be the upside of it all.

Sophia and Leonora seemed to take me quite seriously when I told them about the dreams. Well, at least whatever they were really thinking, they hadn’t let on, and they just showed genuine concern about me and my habit of falling asleep in strange places. Plus I could see in them a growing interest and intrigue in the female character who was starting to emerge as something of a persona in her own right. They weren’t dismissive like Vincenzo, far from it. It hurts, not being taken seriously, and somehow you expect your friends
to
take you seriously. And yes, I know that to the casual onlooker the whole thing must be a bit weird, but after several weeks out here, Vincenzo knows me pretty well, and I have to say I’d hoped he’d be a bit more supportive.

Vincenzo slips away discreetly to settle the bill and do whatever the male equivalent of ‘powdering one’s nose’ is – knowing him it’s probably a bit of self-adulation in front of the full-length mirror, adjusting his crotch and making sure his bum looks pert enough in his tight black jeans. Whilst he’s away I decide that I’m not going to let what he said bother me; he can doubt me if he wants to, I don’t care. I know something strange is happening to me here, even if he just thinks I’m mad.

When we pull up outside my apartment there is one tiny, awkward moment when I think Vincenzo is going to lean over and kiss me, and then he quite obviously decides not to, instead leaning in towards me and giving me a kiss safely on each cheek before stroking my nose gently with his finger, like you’d do with a cute child. He thanks me for my charming company and hops out to open the taxi door for me. Pausing on the pavement, he looks at me hard and chuckles quietly to himself before climbing back into the cab with a ‘
Ci vediamo domani!’
See you tomorrow.

Yes, see the mad-woman tomorrow.

‘
Ciao Mamma
!
Ecco tua figlia!
’ I exclaim as my Mum picks up the phone on the other end of the line. She doesn’t speak a word of Italian, bless her, but hopefully it won’t take her too long to work out that it’s me, her long lost daughter, calling at last.

‘
Sweetheart, how are you? We haven’t heard from you for ages.’ Oh no, here come the hidden, read-between-the lines reprimands. I’ve had a lifetime of interpreting Mum’s
real
meaning when she says something, so I’m used to it. I have only called home twice since I’ve been here, but I’ve sent loads of texts & emails, so it’s not as though I’d disappeared off the face of the earth completely.

‘
I’m good thanks,’ I reply. ‘Course is going well, I’ve made some great friends, and this place is amazing!’ I have absolutely no intention whatsoever of telling her about the dreams
–
I’m not completely stupid. Mum would be over here before you could say ‘Uffizi Gallery,’ whisking me back to the safety of the UK, away from all this, where she could keep a close eye on me. She’d imagine I’d been possessed or something. I might not be into all that ‘supernatural clap-trap’, but Mum is, and she’d think the ‘voices in my head’ were a message from someone, and whilst she’d find it intriguing if it were a third party experiencing it, with her young and very precious baby daughter, it would be the scariest thing ever.

So I keep calm and carry on, filling them in on all the stuff about my friends, my social life, (well, the safe-to-tell-your-parents bits anyway) and my work.

‘
How’s Evie?’ I enquire of my big sister, who I haven’t had any contact with for a couple of weeks.

‘
She’s fine
–
desperate to come out and see you, of course. Well, between you and me, dear, I think she’s working on James to treat her to a slap-up weekend in one of Florence’s finer hotels, plus a bit of designer shopping, you know what Evie’s like.’ Yes I do. There are almost two decades between myself and my gorgeous big sis. I love her to bits and have worshipped her since I was tiny, as she was always the big grown-up one, an adult already whilst I was just the annoying little kid trying to pinch her make-up and drooling longingly over all her fancy clothes. She grew up and moved out whilst I was still small, but the bond between us is very strong.

Evie and I share a Mum but have different Dads. Evie’s Dad disappeared off the planet when she was tiny, and Mum was left in her late teens with a baby to bring up by herself. She didn’t meet my Dad till a decade later, when she’d learnt to stand on her own two feet and thought she’d never find another man, but he had a big enough heart to embrace Evie as his own and stepped straight into the role of father to her. After years of trying for a baby together, they were just about to give up on the notion when I appeared on the scene, later than intended but oh, so wanted. So Mum has always been
incredibly
protective of me; I’m her little baby so it’s understandable, I suppose.

Apparently Evie’s early years were hard, although she says she doesn’t actually remember much about life before my Dad came along. Mum had no money in those days, so when she met Dad and they had more than a couple of pennies to rub together for the first time ever, she lavished material things on Evie to make up for the lack of them early on, especially when they assumed there weren’t going to be any more babies. Not that Evie is spoilt or anything, she isn’t, but she does like the high life, and luckily for her (or was it a matter of careful choice?) she found herself first a well-paid career and then a husband who could maintain the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. James and Evie have a wonderful time, and I don’t resent them that in the slightest, so if they do want to come out here and splash a bit of cash around then good for them
–
as long as they take this impoverished student out for a couple of nice meals and perhaps a little bit of shopping…

Much as I’d love to see Evie, I need to stall her on coming out for a while yet. I can’t have a family member rocking up whilst I am still in the middle of this dream dilemma and don’t know what’s going on. It would just worry my parents too much. So I say to Mum: ‘That would be brilliant, I’d love to see her, but tell her that Florence is at its best in the spring. Before the tourists come over in full force and before it gets too hot. And the sales are on then too.’ That last bit should swing it.

‘
That’s sensible, dear, I’ll pass the message on but then I’m sure you two will be in touch again soon, won’t you?’ Mum, as ever, trying to get her brood together. Evie and I can go for months without so much a text or two, which confounds Mum somewhat, but we always slip back into our fabulous sister-friendship whenever we get together, so the big silent gaps in between don’t seem to matter too much. Mum doesn’t get that, of course, and her constant scheming to bring her babies together more often is sometimes an annoyance, sometimes a source of amusement to Evie and me.

Signore Di Girolamo is giving a lecture on Titian this afternoon
–
at the Uffizi
–
which I
have
to get to. It’s on the symbolism in Titian’s work, and I can’t wait. I just hope that if he pops a copy of the
Venus of Urbino
up on the white board, I don’t go into a trance and start having the next instalment of my dream story. I’m pretty sure my dreams
do
take place in the Renaissance era; having studied so much of the work from that period there’s such an intense feeling of the time and place being hundreds of years ago.

I have some time to kill before the lecture starts so I decide to spend it in my favourite room of the gallery. My phone alarm is set to beep at ten to three, just in case I end up having another little nap this afternoon….

Clara unpins my headdress and releases my hair from the tight braiding which encircles my face, letting it fall across my bare shoulders and down the length of my spine; its natural curl is enhanced by the hours it has spent tightly and intricately bound and it breaks forth from its tether as though possessing a life of its own. She pulls her fingers through it, then gently works at it with the mother-of-pearl comb as I lean back to enjoy the sensation. Her accomplished strokes relax me and as I gaze upon my reflection in the gilded looking glass before me, I see the tension of the day lift from my shoulders, and my humours at once become more serene.

I am beautiful, I know that, and I recognise the good fortune I have to be blessed with an attribute which, in giving me a means to earn a living as I did until so recently, has probably saved my life. God has blessed me with a face which men adore and which women aspire to, and for that I am grateful.

Once established here in my new home in Venice, I sent for my dear Clara to follow me and join the employ of my
casa
. I confess I feared more than a little for her safety, when I left her behind in Bologna. After all, she had been party to my plan to escape with my love, and had been instrumental in facilitating it for me. I could not abandon her to the wrath of Rosetta; whilst my patron had been so kind to me for all these years, I would not wish to imagine her capabilities, were she to decide that revenge for losing me was a necessity.