Emily finished her gelato, then threw her napkin into the nearby bin with an accuracy Teresa wished she could teach Peroni.
She stared out at the flat expanse of grey water, with its ever-active flotilla of vessels, the ferries and the vaporetti, the speedboats and the transport barges, then sighed.
“I’m going to have to tell him, Emily. I can’t just not say a thing.”
The two women had discussed this on the train, huddled close together in a second-class carriage as it rattled through the black airless night. Teresa’s shift hadn’t finished till two a.m. There really wasn’t an alternative to the early morning departure. And it was typical of Emily that she went along with the awkward timing. Teresa had known her now for little more than eight months. Even so, she’d found she was a good person to talk to. On this subject, the best. It was all so much easier than trying to explain the matter to Gianni Peroni’s face.
Emily frowned, took the spent cone of the gelato from Teresa’s fingers, and disposed of it in an oddly maternal fashion.
“You don’t know for sure,” she said, gazing steadily into her face. “Don’t rush things.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Teresa snapped. “I’m a doctor, remember? I can cut through all that bullshit with a knife. I used to dispense it myself once upon a time. That’s how it is, Emily. Nothing’s going to change.”
You never let a patient lose all hope. Not unless there really was no alternative. All those specialists she’d seen, without Peroni’s knowledge, had done their best to hide the truth. But it was impossible. She wasn’t fazed by talk of severe tubal occlusion. She knew how to unpick what they told her. When she did, she was amazed to discover that there could be something so fundamentally, if benignly, wrong with her reproductive system without her knowing. And she could read the look in all their eyes too, when she fixed them with every last unavoidable question she could dream up. Nothing—not surgery, not even in vitro fertilisation—would make a difference. Teresa Lupo was—she loathed the word but it summed up the situation with an apt finality—barren, and would remain so for the rest of her diminishing supposedly childbearing years.
Emily looked downcast. Teresa hated herself for that brief outburst. It was unlike her, and undeserved too.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, and squeezed the American woman’s hands. Nic had done well with her, Teresa thought. She was kind and pretty and straight as a die. Intelligent too. One day she’d make a tidy living as an architect in her own right. Teresa didn’t doubt that, though she couldn’t help but wonder whether it was a profession that would sit well alongside a cop for a partner. “I hereby renounce my bad temper and undertake to be the epitome of sweet and happy innocence for the remainder of this holiday.”
“Let’s not get too ambitious,” Emily cautioned.
“Why not? The idea was ridiculous in the first place. Gianni and I having kids. Him pushing fifty, with two of his own already. Me a spinster of thirty . . . whatever. Who, up till the point he came along, thought children belonged in a pet shop.”
Emily’s face clouded with shrewd, measured scepticism. Teresa envied her looks so much. Emily was slim, she was blonde, she had fine straight hair that never frizzed. She was the sort of woman other women hated. No, not hated exactly. Just looked at and thought: why you, not me? Because it all seemed to come so easily to her, though perhaps that was deceptive. There’d been times recently when Teresa had thought so. When she believed she saw a shadow cross Emily’s face if the subject of Rome and Nic and that big old house off the Via Appia Antica, where she now lived and studied alone, came into the discussion.
This was in danger of turning into one of those conversations Teresa hated. The kind she normally disrupted with a tantrum, a kiss or a sudden demand for a coffee, none of which was available or appropriate in the circumstances.
“The trouble is Gianni,” she confessed. “He’ll take it in his stride. I never met anyone who copes, straight out of the box, with whatever crap gets thrown in his direction. I’m not like that. I dwell on it. If I get the chance, I throw myself into the work and try to forget what’s running round my head. Doesn’t take long either. Except I can’t now. Not here. Not . . .” She waved her hand in the direction of the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore, like a mirror image of the one in San Marco, reflecting in the dappled water. “ . . . with all this.”
“Art,” Emily declared, with a stern glance, one with that disturbing maternal touch about it again.
“I don’t know a single thing about art!”
“I’ll teach you.”
She was pouting like a schoolgirl, and she knew it. She was lost for words too, a touch ashamed. A woman in her mid-thirties shouldn’t be leaning on a slim, pretty American, the young girlfriend of a man she liked and admired. She shouldn’t be hoping some twenty-six-year-old could lend a little balance to a life that had spent so many years out on the far edge of normality.
“Do you have anything gory here?” Teresa asked. “It’s just so I can keep my hand in.”
Emily Deacon frowned. “Not really. Venice is different. More . . . subtle. I imagine that’s the right word. But I’ll do my best.”
“Thanks,” Teresa said. “You make an old woman very happy. And . . .”
Emily Deacon was laughing at that last one. Maybe that was why Teresa felt able to say it, to let slip the dumb thought that should have remained unsaid, hidden at the back of her head.
“ . . . when you two come around to having kids I can be the Mad Aunt. The soft touch for presents. Babysitter. Whatever . . .”
She swore at herself, then looked at Emily Deacon, who was now staring at the lagoon in silence. It was a beautiful view, Teresa decided, even with that faint, antiseptic stink behind everything.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Emily. That was really thoughtless of me. Presumptuous too. I just meant . . .”
Those long, young fingers squeezed her hand. Emily’s pale, smiling face turned to look at her. Teresa hoped she was mistaken, but it seemed there was just the hint of moisture at the corner of those sharp blue eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” Emily remarked, with a quiet insistence.
ALDO BRACCI WAS A SQUAT, SOUR-FACED MAN AROUND fifty, with a bald head and narrow, beady eyes. He worked out of a tiny office on the ground floor of the family furnace almost a kilometre from the Isola degli Arcangeli, down a dark narrow ramo near the museum. It was a world away from the Murano the tourists saw. Dismal, malodorous passages ran up from the canal, high-walled on both sides, too slender to take more than a couple of pedestrians at a time. The rank aroma of foundry smoke and spent gas hung in the air. There was no artifice, no pretension in the workaday premises around the Bracci furnace. These were people desperate to earn a living out of that daily dance with molten glass and the blazing fire. Bracci, in his dusty blue overalls, looked more hungry than most. The chaos in the little office—invoices and bills everywhere—and the meagreness of the works told their own story. These were minnows, a class beneath the grand names found close to the vaporetti stops. Individuals who lived in the margins left by the big players, hoping to find some crumbs falling between the cracks.
Bracci cast a weary eye over a dated-looking vase newly out of the workshop, cursed in impenetrable Venetian, then walked over to the office and placed it in a pile marked “Seconds.” The two cops waited in their seats, wondering, Costa feeling a little edgy after downing three coffees in succession as they trawled the bars for gossip before approaching Aldo Bracci. They had followed Falcone’s orders to the letter. They’d eaten a couple of plates of pasta in a small, unimpressive restaurant. To Costa’s surprise it had been a smart move. People hereabouts weren’t naturally talkative. Until you mentioned the magic name, Arcangelo. Then a picture began to emerge, both of the family and of Murano itself, a place with little time for newcomers who failed to appreciate their place.