Eating With the Angels (5 page)

At that moment, as quickly as it had dropped, the mist lifted. Instantly I felt the heat on my chest. I lifted my head and there in the water, right in my line of vision, standing up, his oar keeping him steady, was my gondolier. He was looking straight at me as if he’d
known I would be there and when he caught my eye he just smiled.

The spirit of Jackie Collins claimed my loins once again.

My foot squelched back on the ground, red and yellow ooze coating the pretty pink suede. My arms hung limply at my side but at least this time my mouth was shut and I bit my bottom lip to ensure it stayed that way. I hadn’t really noticed last time but I saw now he was not wearing traditional gondolier garb, no white sailor top, no be-ribboned straw hat, but rather a black T-shirt that gripped his body, black trousers that rode low on his hips. He had dark hair cut short, spiky on top, and he was taller even than I had thought with big broad shoulders. His face was ridiculously handsome, not too square, not too long, just the right shade of nutty brown. He was in his mid-20s I guessed and as near perfect a specimen as a girl could ever hope to clap eyes on.

He was also sliding away from me, his body still turned in my direction but his gondola about to disappear into the shadows of the bridge’s arches. I felt the sort of sorrow you wake up with when you’ve had to leave an exceptionally good dream. Then the air between us emptied itself of sound.

‘I’m not going to let you go,’ I heard him say in perfect English. It seemed so loud, so close, so real, that I had no doubt in my mind he had actually said it. He turned, slipped into the blackness of the Rialto’s shadows and was gone.

I blew out a lungful of air. I felt dizzy: I was sure I had been holding my breath since the mist rose. The sky was back to being dazzling blue; I felt the heat of the morning sun on my face. The fish gut on my shoe was already beginning to dry and crackle.

What had just happened? The gondolier’s words echoed in my ears but the air was filled now with other noises — the market vendors, men loading and unloading crates into their boats, shoppers bargaining over the price of exotic greens. Who was this man who kept sliding in and out of my second honeymoon making me feel breathless and weak at the knees?

I moved distractedly back over to the mushroom lady who was selling all different sorts of fungi and wearing a brown and white swirling Pucci-style print. The whole scene was surreal, the whole morning, actually, my entire life come to mention it. What had he meant, my handsome stranger, when he said he would not let me go? Now he’d brought it up, I’d never felt more let go of in my life.

‘Èvero — non ti lascierà scappare
,’ the Pucci mushroom lady barked in a way that I took to mean I should buy something or get the hell off her patch. So I shuffled away, stopping to scrape the fish guts from my loafer on the metal rail of an abandoned trolley. I no longer felt like being jostled by bustling strangers and ogling the Veneto’s succulent produce. I needed to go somewhere quiet, nurse a latte and get a grip on myself. I was a recently separated single honeymooner suffering improper leanings towards a strange foreigner — a Venetian gondolier! — for God’s sake. How much more hackneyed a leaning could a recently separated girl have? It was ridiculous.

For a start, I assured myself, I loved my husband, despite the fact he was lying at home swearing into a telephone while I was in Venice without him. I’d belonged to Tom ever since I was old enough to belong to anyone and that was it, case closed. And anyway, I was just not the sort of person who had flirtations with, let alone, you know, longings for handsome men, whether I knew them or not. I just wasn’t like that. On the many occasions I had been out with just my girlfriends and had the chance to play the field or misbehave, even chastely, I hadn’t bothered, even though my closest friend Fleur could have flirted for the Olympics. If we were in
Sex and the City
, which is something we discussed a lot, she would be the slutty Samantha, although she looked more like Carrie but with better hair and a bigger butt. I, on the other hand, looked more like Charlotte, only curvier and taller, but acted more like Miranda, only not so brainy and obviously not as well travelled in the sex department having only ever slept with my husband. Actually, now I see that written down I have to say that neither of us are at all like anyone in
Sex and the City.

Anyway, Fleur wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world — she looked a bit like the Mona Lisa — but she had charisma by the bucket-load. Men loved her. All she had to do was walk into a room and pull out a cigarette and the next thing you knew she’d be swatting them off like flies, the sexual innuendo and witty repartee flying left, right and centre. Next to her, I paled into insignificance. Her secret? Confidence. It was in the flick of her hair, the arch of her eyebrow, the clothes that clung to parts of her other women would disguise with baggy sweaters.

She was the second youngest of five daughters and her parents adored the lot of them, even the eldest, Christina, who had scandalised the parish by falling pregnant at 15 to someone whose name she refused to reveal. In any self-respecting soap opera, this would have torn the family apart and started a war that lasted generations but in the McBride household, that baby was just another thing to love. Sounds corny but it’s true. Their apartment just hummed with goodwill even though Mr McBride was always broke and Mrs McBride sometimes worked three jobs to keep them in groceries. I loved going there. I loved doing anything with Fleur. She was so self-assured. All the girls were. Their parents had made sure of it.

And with all that confidence coursing through her veins Fleur was one hot tamale on the dating scene. She could juggle slobbering males like a circus clown, and did. I was full of admiration for her in this respect, but I used to worry that what with dating six men at once and all, she would never find anyone (one being the operative word) special, a husband of her own. I knew she wanted children. But after a few years it occurred to me that this girl was having so much fun on the single circuit, why would she swap it for sitting at home in front of
Friends
re-runs sucking on a Bud, no coterie of ardent admirers swooning at her feet, a clutch of snot-nosed brats clawing at her hem? She’d probably die of boredom the first night.

Not that Tom and I sat at home watching
Friends
re-runs sucking on Buds — we both worked nights so that was out of the
question — no, we had a much better life than that. But still, without him, I would not have had a tiny little fraction of the fun that Fleur had without a significant other.

I had been crossing back over the Rialto Bridge when this thought hit me and it stopped me in my tracks, whammo. I
was
without Tom. I
had
no significant other. There
would
be no fun. A little bit of the devastation that had been missing hit me right in the stomach then. I was stupid to think I could have avoided it and it hurt, it hurt like hell, in a rock-bottom-here-I-come sort of a way.

I looked up as a well-dressed couple about my own age but more grown up walked up the steps of the bridge towards me. The woman would not be the type to haggle over a rip-off LV handbag; she was wearing a big scarf over her shoulders, the way Italian women can, and everything about her screamed style and money. The man, in blue blazer and impeccable shoes, was appreciatively eyeing a curvy Swedish-looking backpacker in front of me. When she passed him by, his eyes moved on to me and kept moving. They just slid right over me to someone behind. If I hadn’t actually stepped out of his way, he would have walked right over me. I was invisible.

On my list of bad moments, this was a biggie. Right up there with Woody’s pretzel, although of course I didn’t know about Woody’s pretzel then.

Here was clearly a ladies’ man, a sophisticate with a built-in radar for the feminine, a man who probably couldn’t cross a hallway without getting a hard-on for the cleaning woman, and I had not even registered as a blip. This, I thought miserably, was going to be my life without Tom: playing a microbe in the mating game.

I wheeled around, my hand over my mouth, some inexplicable emotion crushing my lungs, and banged, literally, straight into the absurdly fragrant chest of my strapping gondolier.

‘
Finalmente
,’ he said. ‘Finally.’

I know it’s ridiculous, trust me, I know. I mean the whole stupid being-on-second-honeymoon-in-Venice-on-my-own thing had crappy romantic comedy written all over it. You think I couldn’t see that? And while I knew that some people really have those things happen to them — they meet the love of their lives reaching for the last chocolate-chip cookie in the jar or marry the muscle-bound surfer who saved them from drowning on a Caribbean beach holiday — I was not that sort of person. I was a meet-your-husband-to-be-
at-four
-years-of-age-and-get-married-because-your-mom-is-pissed-off type of person.

Yet there I was, standing on the Rialto Bridge staring into the amused almond eyes of an exceptionally good-looking gondolier who was holding my elbow and saying, ‘Finally,’ in that overpowering voice that had sucked the breath clear out of my lungs over by the fish market.

‘Finally what, exactly?’ I had the gumption to ask eventually, sounding squeaky and small and foreign.

‘Finally I’ve found you,’ he said, his voice suddenly seeming quite normal. ‘
Ti ho cercato dovunque
. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

Up close he was even better-looking than from afar. He had the
chiselled looks of a Calvin Klein model, the type of man I would normally consider — if I had ever been in a position to consider such a thing which I hadn’t — way, way, way out of my league. Even Fleur would have probably put him in the too-hard basket and gone for his not-quite-so-cute best friend, if he had one. She was always banging on about picking a reasonable target, not aiming too high. Yet here he was, this Adonis, staring at me earnestly, his exquisite eyebrows (already my favourite part of him) raised in some pleasurable secret.

‘I have rotten fish on my shoe,’ I said.

Plainly, I had never been a hot tamale on the dating scene. Some god-like male creature appears out of nowhere in the city of my dreams saying he has been looking for me, and what do I do? Point out the least endearing aspect du jour; on this particular occasion, a fish tumour splattered all over my loafer. Pathetic.

But to my amazement he laughed as though I had just said the wittiest thing in the entire world and my confused excited heart simply melted, turning the rest of me into mush.

‘I’m Marco,’ he said and bent down, lifting up the leg of my Lucky Brands and putting his hand around my ankle. His touch felt warm and velvety, like Valrhona hot chocolate would if you drank it on the outside of your body. He had a very nice neck attached to those shoulders and small smooth ears that reminded me of pastry. I wanted to nibble on him. Quite a lot. Of course, instead of thinking such lewd thoughts I should have been wondering what he was doing down there because it wasn’t until he tugged at my leg and said, ‘Lift,’ for the third time that it occurred to me he was trying to take my putrid shoe off.

I followed his instruction and he removed the offending article, then stood again and indicated that I should stay where I was while he leaped nimbly down the steps and over to his gondola. He jumped lithely aboard (another Jackie Collins moment) and moved so smoothly to the back of his boat it barely rocked in the water. He
rummaged behind the beautiful blue and gold brocade love seat and emerged with a brush. Then, dipping it in the water of the canal, he sat down, gently dabbed at my Gucci suede, worked his way up to a semi-robust brushing, then looked up at me and smiled.

I wobbled unevenly on one foot as I looked around to see if anyone else was watching but the busy crowd was moving and buzzing, going about its own business, paying no attention to a
one-legged
tourist and her shoe-cleaning gondolier. It was truly bizarre but I gave a little shrug of my shoulders and went back to feasting my eyes on my Good Samaritan. Behind him, a dozen empty gondolas bobbed up and down in the water, their associated gondoliers gathered in striped shirts and straw hats in different groups on the pier, smoking, chatting to each other or on cell-phones, eyeing up potential customers. They too seemed to take no notice of Marco, whose boat gleamed brighter than any of theirs, I thought, the gold paint on the intricate wooden carving behind the love seat glowing quietly, the little blue and gold flag at the front snapping in the faintest of breezes, while similar flags on the other boats hung limp and tatty.

Marco stood up, admired my shoe, jumped onto the pier and started towards me. Even the way he walked was mesmerising …

‘There. It’s done,’ he said.

I nodded, feeling overwhelmed by his attention. I knew I was making a total goof of myself but I couldn’t seem to help it.

‘Hah!’ I said stupidly, looking at the shoe. See what I mean?

The loafer looked almost as good as new and hardly smelled fishy at all. I lifted my foot and he knelt down to slip the shoe on. It was a very Cinderella moment and the silliness of it all kind of gurgled around inside me while I worked out what the next obvious step should be.

‘I’m Connie,’ I said as Marco stood up straight again, practically dwarfing me with his underwear model physique. ‘Constance. Mary-Constance. Farrell.’

‘Constanzia Farrelli. Maria-Constanzia Farrelli,’ he said, rolling
the words around on his tongue as he Italianised the name. How Tom would have loved that, I thought. In fact I was surprised he hadn’t thought of it himself. One tiny little letter at the end of his name and he could have been Italian all along.

At the thought of my long-lost husband, of course, I felt a slap of reality, which left me scrabbling in a deep pool of guilty, grubby awkwardness. ‘What did you mean before when you said you’d been looking for me?’ I asked, mildly belligerent.

‘Why, I saw you arrive, yesterday,’ Marco answered, surprised. ‘We made a connection, remember? On the canal.’

This was a little too forward and frank for my liking. Unless I’m writing a review, in which case I have to cut to the chase or the copy editor will mangle it, I usually prefer an extended period of fluffing around followed by a short stint of prevaricating before meandering hesitatingly towards anything remotely straightforward. His mention of our connection was far too confrontational by half.

‘Yes, well I’m just out for a walk,’ I said irrelevantly.

He laughed. A deep, sexy laugh that almost made me drool. Seriously, I was all over the place. I didn’t know if I was Arthur or Martha as my dad would say. Part of me wanted to jump off the bridge, swim to the airport and fly back into the arms of my husband, another part wanted me to be swept up in a completely different set of arms altogether. A closer set. Much closer.

‘Well, walking is a hungry business,’ Marco said. ‘You must be starved. Let’s eat. I know just the place.’

Now, you don’t have to know me very well to know that to me these words are like ‘abracadabra’ to Aladdin. Had Marco been the ugliest guy in the world with a hairy back, little flat butt and a great big beer belly I still would have gone with him. You just don’t hear, ‘You must be starved. Let’s eat. I know just the place,’ anywhere near often enough in my opinion.

So despite the fact that all I knew about the guy was that he had a strong stomach and a good feel for suede, I reached out and took the
arm he was offering. He guided me through the narrow back lanes behind the market, stopping eventually, after a series of twists and turns I had no hope of remembering, at a low doorway under a barely noticeable wooden sign bearing the name Do’ Mori. The darkly lit wine bar was slender, another low doorway at the opposite end opening on to the next lane. There were no chairs or stools and along one wall were bottles stacked floor to ceiling in dusty clay pipes; along the other was a bar heaving with bite-sized snacks behind which stood a portly matron, her long grey hair falling out of her bun, her kindly face beaming with a radiance I had rarely seen.

‘Marco!’ she crowed. ‘Saving another one?’ Her accent was so thick it took a while for me to work out what she had said and by then my attention was on the bar food. ‘It looks fabulous,’ I enunciated. ‘
Squisito
.’ My mouth was watering. I licked my lips and looked up at Marco.

‘Two glasses of pinot bianco, Signora Marinello,’ he instructed the matron. It was not quite 10 in the morning yet at that point I realised the dozen or so older men standing around in little groups chatting on either side of us were all sipping wine.

Marco laughed at my surprise. ‘Venetians drink more than any other Italians,’ he said. ‘And they do it with pride.’

At this, a florid-faced septuagenarian to my right slammed down his empty glass on the counter and nodded his head for another at Signora Marinello.

She raised her eyebrows as she slid our glasses over to us and turned away again to fulfil his request.

‘Now,’ said Marco, as we clinked glasses, ‘I’ll tell you about
cichetti
. Venice isn’t known for its food, did you know this? Well, not any more. Never mind the fact that the Venetians were once the world’s leading traders and the first to invent the humble fork. Actually, the food here is as good if not better than anywhere else in Italy but you have to know where to find it. Any Venetian worth his salt will bring you straight to La Vedova in the Canareggio or here to
Do’ Mori for cichetti. It’s a favourite tradition of ours, you won’t find many other Italians eating like this. It’s like tapas, you know, but Venetian-style.’

Marco leaned over the bar and grabbed a couple of round white side plates.

‘
Questi
?’ he asked Signora Marinello, pointing to a round brown croquette the size of a small orange. She nodded and smiled, putting the croquette on the plate and passing it over to him. ‘
Tonno
,’ said Marco. ‘You’re going to like it. Trust me.’

He held it up and I opened my mouth, taking a healthy bite out of the soft flesh. It was tuna, light, sweet, mixed with breadcrumbs, parsley and lemon, and gently fried. There was no way it should have tasted so delicate but it did — it made me want to sing. I closed my eyes and groaned, and Marco fed me the rest of it. With every mouthful I salivated at the thought of the next. It was delightful. Signora Marinello clutched her fat hands together in glee in front of her substantial bosom, her rosy cheeks shining.

‘
Polpette
,’ Marco said next and she plucked a meatball off a tray on the counter, plopped it ever so gently on the tasting plate and Marco again held it to my mouth. It was spicy and dense, pink and fleshy in the middle, crackling with pepper and obscenely moist. In other words, delectable. Before I knew it I had eaten the whole thing and my taste buds were crying out for more.

‘Ah,’ Marco said, moving closer to me and peering at the plates of vegetables sitting not far from me. ‘
Peperoni
,’ he told Signora Marinello, ‘and
melanzane
.’ She spooned grilled red peppers and long thin slices of eggplant onto a plate then passed it reverently to Marco who fed me, bit by bit, with a fork. The vegetables were lightly salted and bathed in a nutty olive oil that danced at the back of my throat. I was in heaven.

‘She look nice, don’t you think?’ Signora Marinello asked Marco in a loud voice. ‘Like a nice girl.’ It should have felt odd, Marco feeding me like that in front of her — I mean it was an extremely
personal experience — but it seemed quite natural for her to be there, watching every movement, clocking every groan of pleasure or murmur of delight. Seems creepy when I say it like that but it wasn’t. We are just talking about eating, after all, about food.

Next on the menu were thin slices of delectably fresh bread loaded with fried zucchini and fresh shrimp, adorned with nothing but a bit of chopped parsley, a squeeze of lemon, and freshly ground black pepper. I’m a bread freak — the mere thought of the Atkins diet turns my stomach — and that stuff was good. Not ciabatta, closer to a baguette but denser and according to Marco made on the premises every morning by Signora Marinello herself. In my opinion, there is no bread that tastes better than one made just yards and minutes away from where you are sitting. I’m a firm believer in this.

Anyway, while he was feeding me these Venetian treats, Signora Marinello shuffled away only to return shortly afterwards with a plate of squid, tentacles gleaming, flash-fried in garlic, the hot smell still scorching the air. I devoured it. Marco then picked out a
bite-sized
mouthful of swordfish grilled to perfection; he folded carpaccio, ribbons of rare marinated beef, onto my tongue; and did not take his eyes off me for a second as I savoured
sarde in saor,
plump succulent sardines cooked with wine and a delicate vinegar in such perfect balance that it was simply stunning.

‘You are a woman who likes to eat,’ Marco said matter-of-factly, wiping a lick of oil from my chin with his thumb. It was true, I was, I knew that about myself. Some restaurant critics loved to cook, others to write, but me, I loved to eat. I didn’t care if no one went to the restaurants I wrote about; I didn’t care if they thought my writing was too flowery or not flowery enough or lowbrow or high-falutin’. I just wanted them to know what it felt like to taste some heavenly morsel cooked absolutely perfectly by just the right person at the exact moment you couldn’t think of anything you would rather be doing than eating it. Because that to me was good as it got. Period.

Snapping to, I realised with a start that Marco was no longer at
my side. I hadn’t even noticed him go anywhere. What was it with empty spaces where my menfolk should have been? I stood there, looking casually around the bar, then wiped my own chin, oily fingers lighting tracing the path of Marco’s long brown ones. His absence made me feel confused and sort of worried, my stomach churning for reasons that had nothing to do with Do’ Mori’s delectable fare, so I sought refuge in the motherly features of Signora Marinello. She was watching me intently and I couldn’t quite pick the look in her eyes — but the gist of it seemed to be concern.

‘I’m fine,’ I found myself telling her. ‘Really, I’m fine.’ At this, she leaned over, picked up one of my hands and held it in her own two warm, worn ones. Emotion inexplicably overwhelmed me. I fought the urge to jump across the counter and bury my head in her ample bosom.