I drove the Alfa to the top of the multi-storey. As we got out, Anna popped on her baseball cap and sunglasses. She was dressed in a shapeless grey sweatshirt, skinny jeans and white sneakers. It more or less worked – there was clearly still a beautiful woman underneath it all, and if you knew who she was, you would instantly recognise her, but if you weren’t expecting to see Anna Bloom, Marie Antoinette or, indeed, Aphrodite, you wouldn’t.

  ‘You’re so lucky,’ she said, ‘to have Venice just down the road. Where I grew up, it took an hour and a half to get to the nearest town.’

  ‘I can’t believe America’s that big,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, maybe I exaggerate – the nearest town with a bar. They don’t call it the Bible Belt for nothing.’

  ‘But it must have been so,’ Rose slammed the rear car door, ‘boring.’

  ‘Really, my dear,’ she said in a pretty good Bette Davis impression, which would have been entirely lost on my daughter, ‘how could you say such a thing? My, we had college football, cow-tipping, and church!’

  ‘God,’ said Rose.

  ‘Yup, there was a helluva lot of that. “What do you need the internet for, missy, when you’ve got the divine internet – your pray-ers!” Mom was very devout, even though Dad had run off with another woman. She used to pray for them both, can you believe that? When I ran away …’

  ‘You ran away?’ I said.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you? But maybe I’m exaggerating, just a little – I mean, I didn’t sneak out during the night. When I graduated high school I’d got a place at the community college at that town with the bar, but a gang was driving to some kid’s party in Dallas and I hitched along for the ride. I told Mom I’d be back in a week, but I didn’t see her, in the flesh I mean, for two years, by which time I’d been picked up by Diamond, I mean the modelling agency, and spotted by a scout for Steven.’

  ‘You mean, Steven Spielberg.’

  ‘Hm. And thought – you know what, I’d better take some acting lessons!’

  ‘Wow,’ said Rose.

  ‘You make it sound so simple.’ I glanced at Rose. ‘Perilously so.’

  We had arrived at the dock. While I queued to buy the tickets, in the reflection of the biglietteria I glimpsed Anna take Rose’s hands and lean into her, talking rapidly, but by the time I had returned with the tickets, the pair were standing casually, Anna’s arm now linked in Rose’s as if they were mother and daughter. Rose’s eyes would have usually given me a clue, but these, too, were masked by dark lenses. Anna gave me a preppy smile.

  ‘All set?’

  ‘All set.’

  We weren’t going to Venice ‘proper’, but Lido. Anna hadn’t had a film at the Festival that year so had stayed away, but now ‘the dust has settled’ was keen to meet up with an old friend connected to the Palazzo del Cinema, where the event was held. I’d asked if I could tag along. Rose hadn’t exactly been thrilled – she took her position as Anna’s minder seriously – but I had managed to ambush the pair of them when I’d visited the set, ostensibly in my role as consultant, actually to update Indigo on the progress of his case (inconclusive – the tail we’d put on Mestre hadn’t led to anything, yet) and Anna had said she would be ‘delighted’ to have me along.

  ‘Is it connected to those negatives Indi was so worked up about?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, to tell the truth, I thought it would be useful to meet this lady you’re going to see.’

  ‘Clara del Monte.’

  ‘She sounds fascinating, and I was wondering if she had any recollection of Toni Fausto. Just background, really, nothing very important. If it would be an imposition …’

  ‘You’re kidding! I bet Rose could do with a break from my wittering. And Clara, boy can she talk! She’ll love it!’

  A man shouted: ‘Cast! Positions!’

  ‘That’s me.’

  We watched Anna step nimbly over the cables to her position on the set, where the uber-modern, steel-surfaced kitchen of a nonetheless stiflingly windowless apartment had been recreated and where Ursula (Anna, playing an American expatriate in Bologna) had just been scalded by a malfunctioning hot tap when Maurizio, her husband’s assistant, arrives to pick up some important papers. The pair began to position themselves upon the lines chalked on the floor.

  ‘You’re lying,’ hissed Rose.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You think I don’t know when you’re lying? What do you really want to speak to Clara about?’

  ‘What I said.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re going to spend two days chauffeuring us to Venice just for some “background”?’

  ‘Don’t you want to pass some time with your old dad now you’ve got stardust in your eyes?’

  ‘She’s no fool, Anna,’ said Rose. ‘She’ll know you’re up to something.’

  Because the traghetto would stop at St Mark’s Square before going on to Lido, it was especially packed with visitors, many of whom, like us, had crammed onto the waterbus with their luggage, making it all the more crowded. By the time we had shuffled on board there were no free seats and we were obliged, at least until we reached San Marco, to stand near the middle by the disembarkation point and hang onto the plastic straps. Anna would later remark this was not the first time she had taken a traghetto – she had done so in her early modelling days when she and a Texan friend had interrailed ‘after a gig in Paris’ – but of late she had always been picked up by (water) taxi, which made me feel like a bit of a cheap-skate. Frankly, at those prices it hadn’t even occurred to me.

  Still, my fears of us being mobbed on the boat were unfounded. Anna’s outfit seemed to be holding up. Chewing gum with Rose’s North Face rucksack slung over her shoulder (Rose, meanwhile, had Anna’s Louis Vuitton case) Anna appeared a rather typical tourist. But it was entirely an act: the ‘real’ Anna I had encountered that first time in Miu Miu was at least an inch taller and possessed a kind of grace that simply drew your eye, an indefinable ‘star quality’. In the packed boat, she was simply playing a role – anonymity.

  As expected, the majority of the passengers disembarked at San Marco and we were able to get a seat. The low-lying boat with its windows clouded by Lagoon salt was no sightseeing vessel, so I only got my first good look at Lido as the traghetto docked and we were stepping off. I had mixed feelings – it had been a good while since I’d last visited, the year after my wife had died. Rose had been on a school trip (her days were one continuous whirl of activity back then in an effort to distract her) and the Comandante had insisted I take some time off myself. He had suggested I return to the UK, but that would have been the very worst thing: to suffer the sympathy of family and old friends. Instead, I took myself to Lido in a semi-conscious echo of Dirk Bogarde’s von Aschenbach in Visconti’s Death in Venice. I even brought the book by Thomas Mann, which remained in my luggage.

  While not ailing physically like von Aschenbach, I was heart-sick, although I didn’t for a moment expect the island to still resemble the haunted territory of the film. I was wrong: with its fin de siècle villas and hotels, placid, close-of-season Lido had very much that same sense of gentle mourning, and I spent five days alone at café tables, deserted restaurants; walking leafy lanes, sitting on the quiet beach, visiting old fortifications. It served its purpose – it gave me the time and space and, most importantly, privacy, to properly bid Lucia farewell, at least in this world. And, unlike von Aschenbach, I never once left the island, until I took the traghetto back to Piazzale Roma and drove home.

  But Rose knew none of this. ‘Wow, it’s like a whole other Venice,’ she said as we walked along the Gran Viale. ‘Why have we never been here?’

  ‘We’ve got the house in Cesenatico, remember?’

  ‘It’s not quite the same,’ said Rose.

  ‘There’s always somewhere better, Rose,’ said Anna. ‘But you can be sure there are a helluva lot of places worse. You ever been to an Oscar ceremony?’

  Rose gasped. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Christ, I hate ’em – all the dressing up, photos and fake smiles, and the shit you know you’re going to get the next day in the press for wearing the wrong damn dress, and gawd, the sitting for hours on end, ass aching, making small talk, it’s so dull. But it looks glamorous on the “telly”, that’s what you Brits call it, don’t you?’

  ‘Winning probably makes up for it,’ I said.

  ‘You would think so, but then doesn’t Brad have half a dozen, and Angelina another clutch? Like I was saying, there’s always somewhere, or someone better. “We seldom think of what we have, but always what we lack.”’

  ‘Very true,’ I said. ‘Is that from a play or film?’

  ‘That’s Schopenhauer, honey.’ She flashed me a very white smile. ‘You think I’m just a pretty face? I picked up a Masters in Philosophy while I was hanging around set. I’m not your average Yokey from Okey. Ooh, there it is! Don’t you love it?’

  The Grand Hotel Ausonia could have easily accommodated von Aschenbach, had he not chosen to stay at the now abandoned des Bains. He would have certainly passed five-storey Ausonia as he promenaded along the Viale with his powdered face and blackened moustache, where its mosaic-covered façade embodied the opulence of Belle Epoque travel for the wealthy – yesterday and today.

  ‘I always stay here instead of the Excelsior,’ said Anna as we walked up the red carpet, ‘which is like a hostel during the Festival. This place is so much more chilled, you know?’ She whipped off her disguise and the reception staff stiffened, smiles frosting their faces. A deep-tanned, elderly man in a cream suit with a crimson cravat emerged from the velvet curtain behind them. He rushed around the desk.

  ‘Ms Bloom! So wonderful to have you back with us.’ He took her hand in both of his, bowed and kissed it. ‘We missed you last year, signora.’

  ‘Well, I can’t have an entry every year, Maurizio. A girl’s got to get some rest!’

  ‘Not you, signora, never! I see you are making a film with Mr Adler. There’s not a scene set here?’

  ‘This is strictly pleasure, Maurizio. I couldn’t come to Italy without catching up with Clara. She would be furious.’ Anna frowned. ‘She’s well, I hope?’

  ‘Ah, yes, Signora del Monte is very well, meno male.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Very well, signora. You know I was conceived in the Ausonia, and it’s said, providing I do not step outside its grounds, I will never die.’

  ‘Your wife must miss you, then.’

  He chuckled. ‘She barely knows I exist these days, with the grandchildren.’

  ‘How many is it?’

  ‘Seven. And how are your Brian and, of course, Sonia.’

  Anna looked at us. ‘I named my daughter after this place, although I couldn’t guarantee she was actually conceived here. Oh.’ She turned back to Maurizio. ‘You know, padrone, they barely know me these days, what with the nanny, and their telephones!’

  ‘Questi maledetti telefoni! You have my sympathies, signora!’

  ‘These are my companions. Rose will be sharing the suite with me, and you’ve got a room for Daniel?’

  ‘Signora Rose.’ He shook her hand formally. ‘Signor Daniel.’

  We followed Maurizio along the corridor, trailed by four of the hotel staff, although our luggage could have easily been handled by one. We reached the end and Maurizio opened the door. ‘Your usual suite, signora.’ He stepped aside.

  While British interiors tend to reflect their exteriors, their owners making great efforts to retain – or install – ‘original features’, the Italian sensibility to fashion and design more often means that ancient façades will conceal modern interiors, albeit below surviving beams or frescoes. As such, Anna’s suite looked like something out of Vogue Design, as well it might have been. A grey leather modular sofa faced a flat screen TV, with a coffee table shaped out of a huge piece of driftwood between them. The walls were decorated with abstract art, while a glass-topped desk supported by thick black metal legs was set facing a window overlooking the Gran Viale.

  ‘A home from home, I hope, signora,’ said Maurizio.

  My own room, opposite the suite on the unfashionable side of the corridor looking over the swimming pool, was a continuation of the grey theme, albeit without a living area. But it was certainly a step up on the last place.

  I was unpacking when Rose came in.

  ‘Not bad,’ I said as she sat back against the desk. ‘Five-star living. Don’t get used to it.’

  ‘We’re meeting Clara in the bar in an hour.’

  ‘There’s no need to look so glum, you know I wouldn’t say anything to embarrass you. I genuinely want some background from the lady and, all right, to grill her for some info about the film, but I promise, I’ll be gentle.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Come on.’

  She crossed her arms.

  ‘Is it what Anna was saying to you while I was at the biglietteria in Piazzale Roma? Was she telling you off?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Women’s secrets?’ Rose straightened and went over to the window, drew the curtain aside. She sighed.

  ‘She was simply saying she always made it seem easy and fun because that’s what everyone expected her to say but actually it was really “brutal”, that was the word she used. But you know, Dad,’ she turned to face me, haloed by the afternoon sun, ‘you don’t need to worry. I’m not interested in this world. I mean films, acting, modelling, all that. I want to be … an artist, create stuff, I don’t want to be just a body.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s entirely fair,’ I said. ‘Actors act.’

  ‘In any case, I don’t want my whole life, the whole meaning of my life to revolve around me.’ She shook her head. ‘What I mean, is: what I look like, who I might be pretending to be – I want the opposite. To be able to leave things behind, walk away, create something new. I don’t want to have to tell people what they want to hear. I don’t want to have to smile for the camera. I don’t want any of that shit. I want to be … precisely myself.’

  ‘Your mum would be proud to hear you say so.’

  ‘Mum … You know, Dad,’ her voice broke, ‘you say that … you say that a lot, but I’ve got no idea what Mum would be proud of. I mean, I can remember her, but just as a kid. I never actually knew her as … a person. I’ll never know her like you did, as a grown-up. I’ll never truly know what she was like, what she would have wanted.’

  I patted the bed beside me. Rose sat down. I took her in my arms. It was a long time since I had held her like this, and she felt both bony and womanly. I wished I could hold her forever, stave off the outside world.

  I let go.

  ‘Your mum would have been proud,’ I said. ‘Because if there was one thing she wanted you to be, it was yourself. That’s all she would have wanted. Integrity was very important to her, she was the most honest person I’d ever met – sometimes too much! – and she’d have been proud of you for not being dazzled by all this, for remaining indomitably you.’

  ‘Anna’s not like Mum, then?’

  ‘Not really, although that’s not to say she’s not a good person.’

  ‘Stella?’

  ‘Ah, Stella …’ I thought of my ex who, as Rose’s art tutor, had probably influenced my daughter’s young adulthood more than anyone else. ‘Stella’s driven, that’s for sure. I think your mum would respect that. But … I couldn’t say they were especially similar. I mean, your mum was an activist, Stella’s an artist.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘Who? Your mum?’

  ‘Stella.’

  I shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘It can’t be easy, having a daughter in tow.’ I took her in my arms again.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘You’re my joy, you’re all that keeps me going.’

  ‘Love you too, Dad.’

  Speaking of Stella Amore, I may have been expecting Clara del Monte to be an eccentric old lady like Chiara, my ex’s landlady, who had a penchant for saris and tutus, but the octogenarian who greeted us on the terrace bar at the Ausonia – ‘Don’t get up!’ cried Anna – was cut from a very different cloth.

  ‘Of course I’ll get up.’ Clara del Monte rose from the low, white leather seat with little visible effort, although admittedly she was carrying little visible weight. In a brown floral-design suit and white blouse with matching embroidered flowers, fashionably large-rimmed glasses, and blond feathered hair, she had the appearance of a woman who had once been a great beauty and earned, or came from, or married into, a great deal of wealth. She might have once been a model or an actor, but Anna had told me that she was, in fact, a screenwriter and had co-written (‘It was all co-written in those days,’ Clara told us. ‘As the director usually insisted on a writing credit, but in fact they just put their name to it – the words were all mine!’) some mainstream hits between the sixties and nineties. She was also the author of three novels (‘They dismissed them as “women’s fiction” because they’re about – shock! – the lives of women, and were read largely by women. They’re forgotten now – period pieces.’) but her bestseller was the autobiographical Between Women – Me and Mastroianni based on her long-standing affair with the famous actor (‘It began between Faye’ – Dunaway, Anna whispered – ‘and Catherine’ – Deneuve – ‘and was on and off through the seventies, he came back to me when he tired of the actresses, no offence, dear’ – she meant Anna – ‘although he also soon tired of me breaking his balls and went back to them. “If I wanted a wife, I’d have stayed with the first one!” But the book’s not just about the screwing, sorry, dear’ – she meant Rose – ‘it’s about the life and times, that was what I was truly interested in’ – she held up her bony, manicured fingers and pinched the air – ‘that peculiar moment, those particular people. I wanted to capture it, for it to be almost … anthropological, you know?’ She shrugged. ‘But the only reason they’re still printing it is the gossip.’).

 

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