The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) (4 page)

Marco Donato had retreated to his life of seclusion again. There was one brief moment when it seemed as though Sarah the English girl’s brave decision to burst into his hiding place and confront him might have worked. A couple of days after she left, Marco had spoken to his doctor about the possibility of surgery. Perhaps there was still something that could be done to wipe away the traces of the accident that had changed everything. The doctor confirmed that there had been advances. New techniques might bring a great deal of relief. But then the momentum died away. It had been much too long. That faint flicker of optimism was gone again and Marco turned his face to the wall, just as he had done for real in the private hospital all those years earlier. It was hopeless. The scars were far more than skin-deep.

Silvio knew better than to try to coax his master to talk about the situation. Though Marco had seen no one but Silvio and the doctor in years, Silvio would not dare to presume for himself the privileges of a friend. He just carried on as before. He rose at six to have his master’s breakfast ready for seven. He made lunch at one and dinner at eight. He kept the house clean. He ran errands. He was Marco’s connection with the outside world. But there was an interior world that he could never hope to penetrate.

While Silvio walked the corridors with his trusty wooden broom, Marco remained in his office. In the mornings, he dealt with his business interests. The Donato shipping line still reached every corner of the globe and there were many decisions to be made. Much responsibility. Marco hadn’t lied to Sarah when he told her that he often spent what should have been his leisure time at work. When he did have free time, he read. For the most part he read history. The history of his own city, of Paris and of Germany. He used to draw but he hadn’t picked up his sketchbook in months. Couldn’t think of anything he wanted to look at for long enough to make a drawing of it. Not any more.

Marco stared at his last sketch of Sarah as though, if he looked at it hard enough, it might just come to life. It was the picture he had drawn on the afternoon she had made herself vulnerable to him. He had drawn her sitting in the chair at the library desk. She had her legs open. Her long shirt dress was unbuttoned at the bodice. Her hands were hidden in the folds of her skirt. She was leaning back. Her head tipped. Hair streaming behind her. Her mouth was open. Her throat exposed.

As he looked at the drawing, a far clearer picture conjured itself in Marco’s head. In his mind he could hear her as well as see her. He heard her breathing. He heard her whisper to herself as she read his instructions on the laptop screen. She had trusted him so much. But then he had trusted her too.

What would have happened if he’d dared to show himself to her that day, as she’d asked? Might they have made love for real? He thought about it often. He’d wanted her so much.

Each evening, after she left the library to go home, he would let himself into the library and take her place at the desk. He would read the pages she had been reading. He would brush them with his fingers, as though touching something she had touched so recently could somehow draw them closer.

Once, she left a glove behind. It had fallen unnoticed from the pocket of her coat as she dressed to go back to her apartment in the Dorsoduro and lay forgotten on the mat by the fire. As soon as he could, Marco went straight to retrieve it. He snatched it up and pressed it to his face as though it still contained Sarah’s hand. There was a faint scent of perfume on the wool at the glove’s wrist. Marco inhaled it. There was something familiar in its echo. He kept the glove, hoping that Sarah would think she had dropped it somewhere other than the palazzo. And when eventually he worked out that the perfume she wore was Iris Nobile by Acqua Di Parma, he had Silvio buy a bottle. It sat wrapped up in a desk drawer. A gift he never gave.

Marco still had the glove. It was in his bedroom, in the bedside cabinet. At one point, he had taken it out every night and held it for a moment before he went to sleep. Such a silly thing. The sort of thing a teenage girl would do, he berated himself, but it was the closest he had come to a woman’s touch in so long. Until that night in February at the Martedì Grasso ball.

Sarah could have had no idea how hard it had been for him to make the decision to meet her at last. While Silvio oversaw arrangements for the party, Marco prepared a thousand opening lines. He was as frightened as any young boy planning to meet his first love. No; more frightened. He had so much to lose and so many reasons to expect that she would not want him. That’s why he had chosen to throw the party. It was easy for him to entice her there and easy for him to disappear if it all went wrong. He’d sent the dress to mark her out – exactly as she had suspected – so that he would not have to risk wasting his confidence and energy on anyone but her. The possibility of rejection was so high. He’d felt sick with anxiety and yet he’d still decided that it was worth taking the risk. Sarah had enchanted him. Before he knew it, she would have finished her research and flown back to London. He wanted to give her a reason to stay. He had to make a move before she left.

If she had known how hard it was for him even to admit to himself that’s what he desired, she would never have allowed what happened to happen.

Marco felt he had been waiting for hours when the girl in the dress arrived. Though she held a mask to her face, he knew at once that something was not right. The mask was not the one he had given her, for a start. And though she was the right height and the dress was the perfect fit, this girl did not move like Sarah. Sarah’s way of moving was elegant but modest. This other girl – her friend Bea, as he would find out – sashayed into the room. She didn’t so much walk as dance.

Marco had no time to evade her. He was too slow to move behind a bookcase and she spotted him as soon as she stepped into the room. She flirted with him. She was the kind of girl who would flirt with anyone, was Marco’s guess. She dared him to take his mask off and when he refused, she made a grab for his hand.

Her face had said it all.

Marco had not looked in a mirror for a decade and that night was no exception. In order to reveal himself to Sarah, he had had to convince himself that it was not so bad. Bea’s expression – her mouth open in shock when she saw his burnt hand – told him that he was kidding himself. His hand wasn’t even the worst of it.

Once he had seen how Bea struggled to contain her reaction, there was no chance of him having the courage to meet Sarah that night. Bea was an intelligent woman. She didn’t want to be seen to be horrified, but she was. She dropped his hand as though it was still burning. And then she was embarrassed, fleeing the scene like a child. Why should Sarah be any different? He no longer had the courage to find out.

How Marco had wished he could be whole again. Whole and perfect for Sarah. Then he would not have had to worry about rejection. He could have agreed to her early suggestions that they meet. They could have gone for a coffee, like two ordinary people. They would have had so much to talk about; they would have stayed together for the rest of the day. They would have walked back to her flat in the Dorsoduro and she would have invited him inside and offered him some wine.

After that, the actual seduction would have been a formality. She would have glanced shyly downwards when he went to kiss her for the first time – women always did – but she would have acquiesced enthusiastically, giving in to the desire that had been building between them all day.

He would have followed her to the bedroom with the curious four-poster bed she had described to him in her emails. They would have undressed, marvelling at the perfection they found in one another. He would have kissed every inch of her body. He would have revelled in the beauty of her breasts. He had often imagined how soft they would be. They were so pale, untouched by the sun. The contrast of her rose-pink nipples was perfect.

By her side, he would have lain content for hours, just kissing her and tracing the outlines of her curves. To think of her touching him was almost too much. The thought of her hand around his penis made him catch his breath. The thought of her mouth seeking out his hardness made him close his eyes and let his own hand stray towards his crotch. To be inside her . . . He had no fonder wish.

From the moment Sarah walked into the courtyard garden of the Palazzo Donato, Marco had known he wanted to be with her. The gawky young girl who had haunted his bedside at the hospital had grown into a beautiful woman. She had such poise as she walked behind Silvio and when she looked up, as though she already knew of his hiding place, the sight of her heart-shaped face was like a punch to the solar plexus. From that moment, he was lost. A part of him he’d long forgotten began to come back to life.

In a funny way, to begin with it was uncomplicated. Flirting by email was so easy. It was the modern way. No one thought it odd any more if you didn’t pick up the phone. But eventually, even text lovers have to meet face to face. He couldn’t blame Sarah for wondering why he wouldn’t come out from behind the safety of a screen. Of course, modest and shy as she was, she assumed it was because of some lack on her part.

How ridiculous. She was so perfect. He couldn’t believe she’d ever thought she wasn’t good enough for him. But she had compared herself to the stupid models in those decade-old photographs. If only he had been able to tell her what they were really like.

If only Sarah had known how much he wanted to be able to take her out and show her off and let her know how much he loved her from the pride he took from being beside her. He wanted to show her off to everyone and introduce her to old friends and family. But he couldn’t imagine he would ever really be able to face the world again and, apart from Silvio, his friends and family had long since given up on him. He could not possibly have expected Sarah to join him in his isolation. She needed to be part of the real world. That is what Marco meant when he wished for Sarah an extraordinarily ordinary love.

But if she was willing to sacrifice the ordinary to be with him, then who was he to tell her not to? Perhaps it could work.

A small, rebellious part of Marco’s brain kept trying to be heard above the rest. She had come back to him again and again. She had put her fears to one side and kept trying to break through. Who was he to tell her she was wrong? Perhaps she really did love him for his heart and his mind. Perhaps the way he looked really didn’t matter to her. It wasn’t impossible.

But then she did not know the whole truth, did she? She had not believed him when he told her his outer appearance was a manifestation of inner corruption and cowardice. If she knew the truth, she would finally see him differently and no amount of kind-heartedness would be able to get past the way he looked then.

Marco silenced the optimistic voice again.

Alone in his secret office, he hid his favourite drawing of Sarah inside his own diary, alongside the real story. The ugly truth.

Chapter 4

Berlin, September last year

I couldn’t sleep on my first night in Germany. I got into bed, but the strange room and the unfamiliar sounds of the house settling down for the night meant I could only lie beneath the duvet with my eyes wide open, watching shadows pass across the ceiling, wondering if that noise I heard was a creaking pipe or footsteps on the stairs.

Eventually I gave in and got up. It was too late to watch television so I decided I would do some virtual housekeeping. My email in-box was full of messages I didn’t need to keep. In the darkness of the night, with only the light of my screen to illuminate the room, I responded to all those emails I had been meaning to take care of for months. They weren’t urgent, but they were still important. I made myself some camomile tea, then I set about bringing old friends and colleagues up to speed with what I was doing. I sent out belated birthday greetings – some so late it was easier to call them early for the following year – and gave my take on gossip doubtless long since gone cold. Apart from those who were closest to me, I had been neglecting my friendships over the past nine months. When Steven and I first broke up, I’d hidden myself away because I didn’t want to have to explain what had happened. Then came my trip to Venice, then Paris, then a summer on the road. It was time to reconnect at last.

It was also time to do some weeding.

When I had finished dealing with the current emails, I turned my attention to those I had saved over the years. I had a file full of emails from Steven. Hundreds of them: from the effusive ten-page-long love poems we sent to each other at the very beginning of our relationship to the curt ‘Please remember milk’ notes that characterised the end. I didn’t bother to open them but I decided against deleting them too. It no longer hurt me to see them and one day, I thought, I might like to reread some of the early ones.

But then I came to another file. It was titled ‘Marco’ and it contained everything we had ever written to each other that hadn’t been committed to paper. It was home to all our emails and screen-grabs of our direct messages. Every digital missive we’d sent one another, from Marco’s first response to my letter asking if I might visit the library, to my email telling him that I knew he was behind the ‘out of the blue’ job for the film company making Augustine du Vert’s biopic. The only other things I had to remind me of our strange relationship were Marco’s first and last handwritten letters: the first letter inviting me to the palazzo and the other asking me to give up on him and not come back again. They were tucked into my notebook, next to the rose I had stolen from his garden. The flower, which I had pressed between two pieces of paper, was now so dried out and delicate it was starting to crumble and I had read Marco’s farewell letter so often that it too was in danger of falling apart, having been unfolded and folded so many times. I didn’t need to open it again. I knew its sad paragraphs by heart.