‘What do you mean, over? Surely you don’t mean what you said up there … that you would …?’
‘What does that matter to you? Why should you care?’ Addy laughed a new laugh he had never heard, like the deep cooing of doves, a laugh that sprang from some deep, unknown joy. ‘Why should you care? Four weeks together … why should you care what comes after that?’
She rose from her chair, moving her fingers in the air in front of her face as if she were counting.
‘You’d better go now. The others will be back any minute and it wouldn’t be good if Judith saw you.’ He put his arms round her to say goodbye, and she gave him a swift, absent-minded kiss her, thoughts obviously far away. Then she pushed him out of the door.
Abady arrived in Venice in the early afternoon. The sun was shining brightly when he stepped into a gondola and gave the directions of a little-known hotel behind the San Marco Square which few foreigners ever discovered. At seven o’clock the same evening he went to the Ponte Canonica, just as they had planned in their letters. It was easy for Adrienne to find her way there through the little backstreets where no one would see and recognize her. She was staying in the Danieli Hotel in the old Palazzo Dandolo on the Riva, though she was the only one of her party to do so. Her sisters and Mlle Morin were installed in one of the huge palace hotels on the Lido where Adrienne joined them each day, bathing with them, eating her meals with them, and then returning to Venice in the late afternoon or evening. ‘It’ll be better like that,’ she had said to Margit. ‘I can’t sleep out here with the roaring of the sea in my ears. Anyhow it’s better for Judith if I’m not always before her eyes.’
She wondered afterwards if it might not have been better to have given only one reason — two was perhaps protesting too much — but Margit, cleverer and brighter than the others, had merely replied unconcernedly: ‘You’re right! I’ve noticed that she’s still rather resentful of you. Far better not to be around all the time.’ However, when Adrienne moved out of their hotel and had boarded the launch that would take her to the Danieli, Margit walked slowly back from the quay. As she did so little secret smile played round the corners of her mouth.
The Ponte Canonica is only just behind St Mark’s and can be reached either through the basilica itself or by way of a narrow street behind the hotel. It is a bridge of white marble, arched in the centre, with shallow flights of steps leading down to the canal. Balint had his gondola tied up on the side by the little church so that he would be able from afar to see Adrienne as she came to their rendezvous.
The seven o’clock chimes from the nearby Campanile had just sounded when she appeared in the distance, her distinctive walk as elegant as ever. The lines of Adrienne’s long legs were clearly etched beneath the thin green silk of her spring dress. Balint did not wait to greet her but returned swiftly to his gondola. In a few minutes she had joined him.
Their gondolier, one Riccardo Lobetti, did not have to be told that Balint and Adrienne’s meeting was a romantic tryst. He knew it instinctively and so off he went only asking where he should go when they were well away from the meeting place and were gliding down a lonely stretch of canal bordered by high walls.
‘To the Lagoon!’ ordered Balint.
The slight splash made by the single oar made a slow gentle rhythm behind them and the long craft swayed slightly at each movement. They glided through deserted canals where the low tide had revealed festoons of river moss that covered the foundations of the tall houses on each side. All around it was quiet with no sound other than the soft swishing of Riccardo’s long oar just behind their little curtain-hung cabin. Only sometimes, as they approached the junction with another canal did they hear the long-drawn-out call of the gondolier ‘Saa … aa … i.i.i …!’ and from around a corner the answering cry from another as yet unseen boatsman. Their gondola glided on, so skilfully handled by their own invisible oarsman that they never even touched another boat, or the sides of the canals, not even when the passageway was at its narrowest and they met huge heavily-laden barges. No sound, no touch; everything passed as silently as in a dream. To Balint and Adrienne, seated side by side under the flimsy canvas tent of the gondola’s tiny cabin, it was like a God-given dream of unexpected ecstasy.
They leant back on the soft cushions, their hands clasped, not speaking, not moving, almost in a trance, as slowly their little craft emerged from the haunted shadows of the canal into the shining radiance of the lagoon itself where the horizon seemed to be at an infinite distance, the late afternoon sun glistening in a thousand reflections on the smooth waters over which they floated. Everything was marvellously pale, in iridescent shades of grey and pearl, with only the faintest hints of the softer shades of the rainbow. The sky was greyish-blue and the waters bluishgrey, so alike that it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. Everything melted into everything else, fusing all they could see into one uncertain, vaporous abstraction. Far in the distance there was what might have been the outlines of an island with, in front of it, other smaller islands identifiable only by the unexpectedly dramatic vertical lines of black cypress trees which looked like distant exclamation marks on a faded parchment.
There was nothing around them but water. Nothing else. Water, only water; and it was as if they were utterly alone in a world of their own, floating over the waters of the lagoon just as their minds floated over the mystery of their love. Adrienne took off her wide-brimmed straw hat and, holding it in her right hand, nestled her left shoulder into Balint’s. However, when he bent down to kiss her, she demurred gently but firmly, with a gesture that somehow was not really denying him but only waiting for the right moment. Her brows came together, her eyes looked at something far, far away. She was thinking. Balint sensed that she was remembering all those things that had happened to them both in the past and had now led to this moment when, as they lay in each other’s arms, they both knew that very soon their love would be fulfilled. Adrienne went over in her mind all she could remember of the turbulent course of their meetings and she knew that they were now approaching the great turning point in their mutual fate, a turning point that she both ached for and yet feared. They were on the threshold of something ineffably wonderful … and yet, reviewing in her mind all that had happened in the past, Adrienne was suddenly overcome by a feeling of bleak uncertainty, of terror at the thought of the unknown future. Balint felt it too. Looking at Adrienne’s pensive face, he recalled the terrible words of the letter she had written admitting the reality of her love for him but begging him to leave her alone because of what the consummation of their love would force her to do.
He wondered if she still felt the same way. Was she still obsessed by that terrible decision? Was she really prepared to sacrifice her life to pay for these few weeks of happiness? And would he, knowing this, accept the gift of her body? Her soul was already his, so why should he pay such a price to possess her body as well? Because that was what all this amounted to, what it all meant. If they were to have this month of happiness together and then Addy killed herself, it would be far more terrible than dying himself. He could never live on if he carried with him the knowledge that he had allowed it. It would be as if he’d committed murder.
Obsessed and confused by these thoughts Balint knew that now, somehow, all this must be made clear and that he had to extract a promise from her that she would never do anything as terrible as she had threatened. Her ear was close to his mouth, so close that he didn’t have to bend down when he whispered: ‘May I come to you tonight?’