2.45 p.m.
Caroline is standing in front of the four horses, the ones from Constantinople they keep here, upstairs in San Marco. She’s been here with Pete but he wouldn’t let her touch them. He was right, no one is supposed to touch, there’s a sign saying no photos, no touching, and Pete wouldn’t let her take their picture either, led her outside to get close to the copies standing above the front doors to the big church. But Caroline has wanted to touch the originals since then, and now she does. She walks around the barrier, ignores the camera she knows is watching, and stands before each horse. There are a few other tourists in here, not many, it’s as if no one really cares about these horses. That’s one of the reasons Caroline wants to touch them. She thinks they should be outside, that they shouldn’t have to mind about the weather and the pigeons, wants them to be open to the world as they must once have been, long ago, far away. The other tourists are tutting, one uses it as a chance to take a photo, his camera flashes just as Caroline turns her head, a hand reaching out to the fetlock of the first horse, and from the light, from behind the light, blinded by the flashlight, Caroline thinks she sees a face she recognizes.
A security guard comes and Caroline is asked in very polite English to leave the building. The man with the camera is asked to leave too. She does as she is told.
2.58 p.m.
Outside, in the square, the bells about to ring, people gathering to listen, Caroline rubs her eyes. Behind her palms, behind her lids, she sees the negative image of the man with the camera that made the flash and also the man standing behind him, watching her, the man she thought she recognized. Caroline doesn’t know what John looks like now. The man she thought she saw looked like John might look, now.
Caroline feels sick. The ice cream and the bitter coffees and the adrenaline rush of getting kicked out of the church, it is that, it’s definitely that, it can have nothing to do with thinking she saw John behind the man, behind the light of the flash. That would just be paranoid.
3.01 p.m.
The bells have begun to ring and it’s too loud for her here, ears fuzzy with ringing, bile in the back of her throat. Caroline walks across the square, beneath the portico, takes a right down a street, any street, it doesn’t matter. She walks for ten minutes, fifteen. The afternoon sun is beginning its descent; light angles into the narrow paths between buildings, the high white clouds of earlier are burned off, and every now and then the sunshine catches a window, bouncing sunlight back into her eyes, and each time it’s like the flash going off, the man taking the photo and the man behind him, and now Caroline is sure it was John, looking, just looking, not surprised to see her, just there. Looking. Watching.
3.35 p.m.
The turn she just took has led her down an alleyway between two houses and to a dead end. Caroline stops as the alley peters out, falling into water. She can see where it would continue. Over there, across a narrow canal, just wide enough for two small boats to pass each other, over there is a café where people sit and chat, drinking coffee and wine, drinking spritz, the Aperol bitter in the bubbles. They are close enough for her to hear the American accents of the group of young people, talking about where they will go tomorrow, about a friend who will join them later. Two middle-aged women sit side by side. They speak more quietly, but even so, the canal here is so narrow that Caroline thinks she can hear their Italian lady voices, their soft, discreet murmurs in someone else’s language. Both women are beautifully groomed, each with a dog in her lap. The dogs should match the women, they too are beautifully groomed, coiffed hair poking out from little dog-shaped coats on their small, round bodies, but the women look as if they are holding the wrong dogs, each one holding her friend’s.
The street continues past the café, but Caroline cannot walk down it, the water is in the way. To her left, past a row of houses, is a bridge, but the houses are right on the water, there is no walkway alongside them. There are two boats moored here at her feet. For other people, for locals, this would not be a dead end at all, this would be an opening, an exit, a way out, a way home. For Caroline there is nothing to do but go back. She begins to turn, looking down the alleyway behind her, into a cooler darkness now. The lower sun can no longer reach down here and the alley looks dark, its distant opening into a broader street hidden in shadow. There is nowhere else to go but back and as she turns Caroline hears a loud laugh from the group of young people on the other side of the water. She doesn’t know why, but she feels like they are laughing at her. She twists around, and now she’s sure the young woman at the rear of the group, head thrown back in laughter, head leaning forward to kiss the young man beside her, kiss him long and hard… Caroline is sure she’s the chambermaid who brought the trolley last night, with champagne and food and the sleeping pill, the young woman who spoke no English. But the young woman’s face is obscured, by the young man she is kissing, and they were all speaking English she is sure, speaking with American accents.
Caroline takes a deep breath, she feels tears behind her eyes and she does not want to cry, doesn’t want to feel sick, is in danger of doing both. She plunges back into the alleyway, pushes past a Spanish couple who are clearly walking in the wrong direction, who are lost and start to ask her directions, pull out their map, and then they take a closer look at her face, step back, allow her to pass. Caroline rushes on, walking down streets and along narrow canals and across bridges, everywhere other accents, Spanish and French and English and American, is no one here Italian? She thinks of an Italian friend at home whose family come from Venice, who said no Italians can afford to live there any more. And then she shakes her head again. What is she thinking of her friend for? Why is she thinking of John?
3.55 p.m.
Caroline stops. She is in a small square. There is a bar at either end, a church in the middle. She goes to the closest bar, sits down, orders a coffee and a glass of prosecco. Her hands are shaking. What is she thinking of? She isn’t thinking at all. This is insane. Of course that girl wasn’t the same girl from the hotel, there must be hundreds of young girls in Venice, all of them tourists or students or here with boyfriends and girlfriends. All the young girls look the same anyway. Caroline is on the edge of calling herself a woman, not a girl any more. These days, when she sees a young woman she sees the fine skin, the fresh eyes, sees the new. Sees what Pete saw in her at first and what he maybe sees no longer. Sees what John saw in her. She smiles, the coffee and wine arrive, she takes a long slow sip of both, one after the other. Stop it. Stop it. Her hands slowly stop shaking. John always said she was paranoid, that he was not possessive, as she thought him, just loving, wanting to take care. Pete’s the other way; accuses her of jealousy sometimes. He says she has no reason for it, that she’s imagining things, imagining flirtations, potential. There must be hundreds of young girls in Venice, thousands. Caroline finishes the prosecco, orders another.
4.10 p.m.
Her phone beeps. She is low on battery, should have plugged it in last night, wasn’t thinking, must start thinking. It’s Pete again: About to turn off my phone. Plane taxiing. Air steward has glared at me twice. I love you. Coming.
Caroline smiles, nods to herself, breathes out a breath she didn’t even know she had been holding. She rubs her neck, downs the now cold coffee, orders a third prosecco. She texts back, it doesn’t matter that Pete won’t get this, it doesn’t matter that he will only pick it up when his plane lands, it matters that she tells him. I love you. I’m waiting for you.