Precious Gifts (9 page)

“Are you a photographer?” she asked as they strolled across the square together. The camera he carried looked very professional.

“Yes, I am, a chronicler of the evils of the world, of which there are many,” he said with an ironic tone.

“Then why were you photographing me at the fountain? There's nothing evil about that.”

“You were so beautiful,” he said kindly, as his face softened. “I wanted to capture it forever. The sun was picking up the color of your eyes, and there was something very poignant about your expression. Part hope and part sadness as you thought about your wishes. I hope they come true.” He smiled down at her, and there was something very gentle in his face. And at other times, she had noticed, he was very intense and serious. She suspected that he was a man of many facets and moods. “Well, don't get run over by a gondola,” he said as he walked her to the Cipriani shuttle.

“I won't. Thank you for saving me in Rome,” she said sincerely, deeply grateful. In fact, he had saved her from herself, in that fraction of a second when recent events had overwhelmed her and she had abandoned herself to the fates, and then he intervened.

“Anytime. It was a pleasure. And I'm sorry about the hands and knees. I'll be gentler next time, if it happens again.”

“I hope it won't,” she said fervently, remembering Nikolai's Ferrari heading straight toward her, until Aidan's superhuman push.

“I hope so, too. See you around somewhere tomorrow,” he said casually.

“I won't follow you, I promise,” Véronique said, smiling.

“You don't have to. I kept seeing the same people again and again all day. That's because I was lost most of the afternoon,” he confessed, and they both laughed as she got into the boat.

She waved at him as the boat pulled away, and he waved back, watching her go and wondering if he'd ever see her again. Fate had intervened three times so far. At the Fontana di Trevi, when he pushed her out of the way of the Ferrari, and now twice in Venice. It seemed too much to hope for destiny a fourth time, and he doubted that it would. No one could be that lucky, he told himself, as he walked away, thinking about the color of her eyes. She was even more beautiful than he'd remembered when he saw her at the fountain in Rome. She looked like a raven-haired angel to him. And it was odd the way fate and coincidence kept putting her on his path. He knew where she was staying now, but he didn't want to intrude on her. They were strangers, and all he could hope was that somewhere on the streets of Venice, he would run into her again.

V
éronique got into the Basilica San Marco early the next morning, using the ruse that Aidan had suggested. When she told one of the guards that she was there to attend mass, he immediately lifted the rope and let her in. And in the end she stayed for the service anyway. It was a simple, beautiful mass in the extraordinarily exquisite church. She couldn't stop gazing up at the ceiling and the art all around her. She lit candles for Paul and her daughters before she left the church. And she realized that indirectly, she had come back to Venice because of him, to try to authenticate the Bellini they had wondered about for thirty years.

She visited countless small churches once again, also Santa Maria della Salute, which was one of the city's landmarks, and the Cloister of San Gregorio nearby, and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, which she remembered visiting with Paul. By lunchtime, she was all churched out and stopped at a trattoria for a slice of pizza, and then she went back to meandering through the narrow streets, glancing into shop windows, and she peeked into several jewelers on the Rialto Bridge and stopped to watch the gondolas sliding beneath it.

She wanted to take a gondola ride but hadn't had time yet, she was too busy visiting churches and admiring the art, and she was just emerging from another tiny chapel she'd discovered when she ran into Aidan again. He was eating a chocolate gelato, and it was dribbling down his chin as he saw her and grinned. He had been hoping he would see her again, but was determined to let fate make the decision for him. She was friendly and polite, but he could easily see that their worlds were far apart. He was staying at one of the cheapest hotels in Venice and content to do so, and she was at the most elegant hotel at the Lido, which to her was commonplace. And in Aidan's opinion, the two worlds didn't mix, but he was happy to see her by chance.

“I got into San Marco this morning, thanks to you.” She smiled broadly when she saw him, as he wiped the gelato off his chin and popped the rest of the cone in his mouth. It was another minute before he could speak, and he was silently observing her eyes again. Their lush violet color was mesmerizing. “But then I decided to be honest about it,” she admitted, “and I went to mass, too. The church is incredibly beautiful. What did you do today?” They acted like old friends, and he had finished the cone by then and could talk.

“I've been photographing frescoes and people in the streets. The faces are so good here, almost as good as the art.” As always, he had his camera in his hand.

“Do you sell the photographs to magazines and newspapers afterward?” She was curious about him, and he was obviously a pro.

“I'm not that kind of photographer.” He smiled as they walked side by side. “I do gallery shows of my work, and I hope to be in museums one day. I'm fascinated by the offbeat, the mysterious, and the grim. I'm having a show in Berlin soon. I have a very good rep, and he gets me into some interesting shows.” Véronique knew that the art scene in Berlin was very advanced, and many American artists showed their work there, but she had never been to Berlin. “I had a show in London last year. I got some fairly decent reviews, if that means anything, which of course it doesn't. Reviewers can be jealous little people with no talent and small minds.” He dismissed them summarily with an irritated look. “Have you ever had a show of your artwork?” he asked, equally curious about her. He had seen how skilled she was from her sketch at the café the day before. They were both chroniclers of life and the human condition, which fascinated him.

“Only once when I was very young, but it wasn't a real show. My father organized it for his friends. I was still a student then, at the Beaux-Arts. It was very embarrassing, and I got some commissions out of it. I really haven't painted in a long time,” she said, always modest and dismissive about her talent.

“Why not?” Aidan pressed her, sounding as though he disapproved. He hadn't had a camera out of his hands since he was in his teens. He always said the camera was his eyes and he couldn't see without it. And thought she would be the same about her art. He was very militant about using the talents one had been given, and not wasting them. He pushed himself hard and expected a lot of those around him.

“I was busy,” she said, to explain not painting for many years, as they wandered down the street, “married, raising children, and too lazy now.” She dismissed the question easily, but Aidan was never satisfied with superficial answers, though she didn't know that about him. He went straight to the core of every issue, which showed in his photography, too. Even simple honesty was never enough for him—he always wanted more.

“Those are poor excuses for not using your talent,” he said critically. “Maybe you're not lazy, you're scared.” She was startled by what he said and was silent as they walked along, as she thought about it, and then she looked at him.

“You're probably right,” she said thoughtfully. She was an honest woman, particularly about herself, and never put on airs. “I've been afraid to paint for a long time, particularly since my kids grew up, and I can no longer blame not painting on them.”

“Afraid of what?” He delved deeper, always wanting the real answers and not the easy ones.

“Maybe afraid that I have no talent, that I'm an artistic fraud. It's easy to paint a portrait that makes people happy. You correct the obvious flaws, do something gentle that idealizes them. If you painted the truth, and what's in their soul, it would scare the hell out of them, and they'd never buy it. I was always kind in my work, and painted the ideal more than the real. I don't want to do that anymore. I never really did. And I didn't want to be a commercially pleasing artist, which you really have to be, so I stopped.”

“Then paint what you really see and how you feel,” he said simply. It seemed obvious to him, but his subjects were criminals and convicts, prostitutes and derelicts, drug addicts and people in the streets. He didn't have to please anyone but himself.

“And who would I paint for, Aidan?” she said, looking him in the eye with her violet laser glance. Her gaze was as intense as his, and he liked that about her.

“You paint it for yourself, not for them,” he insisted.

“Not with portraits, or no one would let you paint them. It would terrify them.”

“Can't you do both? Be honest and be real, and still true to yourself?”

“Maybe. I never worked that out. I was very young when I stopped painting.”

“You try to make it sound like you're old,” he said with an air of disapproval. “You're not.”

“I'm old enough,” she said honestly, and she had more experience about life than he did. Despite the gray in his dark hair, he looked young. “Older than you are,” she said with a cautious smile. She felt as though they were becoming friends. It was a serious conversation for two strangers to be having on a Venetian street, only days after they'd seen each other for the first time. But Aidan wasn't a trivial person—he was intense.

“I'm forty-one,” he challenged her, convinced that she was younger than he, though not by much.

“I'm eleven years older than you are, I'm fifty-two.” He was stunned and hadn't expected that at all.

“I thought you were thirty-five, or late thirties tops.” She had a youthful way about her and a gentle style that made her seem younger than she was. And there was no age to the way she dressed. Her face had been very little touched by the passing years. “I'm impressed.”

“Thank you,” she said with a broad smile.

“I think age is irrelevant. It's about what you're doing and thinking, how alive your spirit is, not what your passport says. I've known people half my age who were dead. I photographed a hundred-year-old man last year, and his spirit was younger than mine.”

“Unfortunately, I don't see my spirit when I look in the mirror,” she said, laughing, “I see my face. That's a little scary at times.”

“You look like a kid,” he said, glancing at her. “How many children do you have?” There was something fascinating about her, in every way, physically, philosophically, and he wanted to know more about her life. She was equally intrigued about him. He had a dark mysterious quality to him, and then the sunshine would burst through the clouds when he smiled or said something kind.

“I have three daughters. They're in their twenties, work hard, and have busy lives.” Busier than hers, which was a problem for her now, trying to figure out what to do with herself. All signs recently seemed to be pointing to her going back to painting. Paul had suggested it in his will, and now Aidan, who barely knew her, was pushing her in that direction, too.

“What do they do?”

“A social worker, a baker, and an actress.” She had to admit, it was an odd mix when she said it like that, but it was true.

“Interesting. You must have given them a lot of leeway to be themselves.”

“No.” She laughed at his comment. “They're all very headstrong young women and do what they want.” She sounded as though she admired them for it when she said it, and he heard that, too.

“And are you headstrong, too?” he asked her, searching her eyes, wanting to discover who she was.

“No”—she shook her head—“not as much as they are. That's the privilege of youth, not having responsibilities and answering only to yourself. What about you?”

“I'm hell on wheels,” he said proudly and she laughed, not sure if it was the truth, although she could imagine him being difficult. He had his own ideas and wasn't afraid to voice them, even with someone he didn't know well. “I've never been married, have no kids, and never wanted any. I think I'd be a lousy parent. I'm too independent to be a good influence on a child, and maybe I'm too selfish by now. I've lived with two women. One hates my guts for not marrying her after five years. The other woman and I have ended up good friends. We lived together for eight years. I ended it because I was bored—we both were. We stopped growing together, and I wanted out before we hated each other. It's not easy to make relationships work, and we were very different. She was a barrister from a wealthy aristocratic family, and I was too bohemian for her, or at least her family thought so. She married a member of the House of Lords, and they were thrilled. I was her little detour before she settled down.” He sounded slightly bitter as he said it, and Véronique could hear it in his voice.

“You don't like aristocrats?” she asked him boldly, which was unlike her, but he'd been candid with her.

“I'm allergic to them,” he said with fervor, “particularly if they have money. I grew up dirt poor, and I believe in the honesty of the masses. When I was a kid, I always envied the rich. I always thought they were happier than we were, and then I discovered they're just as miserable—they're just politer and use bigger words.” She laughed at what he said as they continued walking.

“Not all rich people are bad, although some certainly are,” she admitted, thinking of how corrupted Bertie had become by his pursuit of money, greed, and envy of everyone.

“And not all poor people are good,” he conceded. “They tend to be more honest, though. If they hate you, you usually know it when they tell you to sod off. I can't stand pretense and hypocrisy. Arabella's family drove me mad—they were never honest about anything, just incredibly well bred and polite. I'd rather have a poor man spit in my eye than a rich one shake my hand. My father's family were coal miners from the North, and my mother's family was slightly more genteel. Their families hated each other, and they were miserable with each other for most of their marriage. Chalk and cheese, as we British say. Those matches don't work. Like marrying fish to birds.” He had very definite ideas. She wondered what he'd think of her family, and Paul, who had married her for her money and lived off her shamelessly for thirty years. It wasn't admirable, but they had had ten good years together, and she got three nice children out of it, which made her feel it had been worth whatever it cost her. “You're divorced?” Aidan asked her then, and she nodded.

“We stayed close. My ex-husband died two weeks ago, and we were all very sad about it. It's a bit complicated. He wasn't a great husband or father, but he wasn't a bad man,” although he had cheated on her, lied, and spent as much of her money as he could. She was having mixed feelings about him ever since he died, after the revelation of the daughter he had fathered during her marriage. It was one transgression too many. But she didn't say any of that to Aidan.

“He must have been young to die,” Aidan commented. “Accident or heart attack?”

“He had a stroke a year ago. He was a lot older than I am. He was eighty when he died. My kids are still very upset. It will take time to settle down.” That and the shock of Sophie. She wondered if they'd ever get over that. She didn't think she would, given the circumstances. In the last two weeks, it had tainted everything she'd felt about him. And she felt oddly adrift as she talked to this stranger about people he didn't know.

“I must sound like a Communist to you,” Aidan said, smiling, as they sat down on a bench facing some trees and a small park where children were playing and their mothers were watching them.

“No, just very clear about what you think. And not very fond of rich people,” she said, smiling back at him. “Sometimes I'm not either. And I don't like hypocrisy and lies. But I don't think that's particular to the rich. I'm sure people without money lie, too.”

“Constantly,” Aidan said with a grin. “It's the nature of man, and some women.” But he seemed unusually honest, even about himself, and cut to the heart of things, seeking the truth.

They sat on the bench in silence for a while, observing the children. Scenes like it always reminded her of the happy days when her own children were small. It was hard not to miss that now.