The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) (28 page)

But eventually, someone had to tell me what had happened out there on the road. At last, the doctor came over. He checked my vital signs and told the hospital priest, who was standing waiting for him to finish, that now was the moment. He could reveal all.

The priest, who was Catholic – though he ministered to anyone of any faith – had spent some time in Italy when he was in the seminary. He spoke Italian well. Very formally. He had a kind face. I will never forget it. I will also never forget the hint of pity in his eyes as he looked at me.

The priest laid his hand over mine and I knew everything before he even tried to explain it in his textbook Italian.

‘Lei non ce l’ha fatta.’

She didn’t make it.

He didn’t use quite the correct phrase but his meaning was clear.

He went on to explain to me that Silke had been alive when she was pulled from the wreckage of the car. She died on the way to hospital from a massive cardiac arrest brought on by the trauma of the accident.

The priest needed to ask me lots of questions. They didn’t have any identification for Silke. Her passport would later be found by the owner of the cottage where we had stayed. Silke had left it behind in the drawer of the bedside table. I sometimes think she did it deliberately, to scupper my plan to drop her off at Heathrow. Was she thinking that I would give in and take her to the party after all?

‘Do you know if she had any brothers or sisters?’ the priest asked.

‘I don’t know.’

I couldn’t remember. Later it would come back to me that there was a younger sister. A half-sister, Anna, who adored her. She was Silke’s ‘mini-me’.

When I was well enough to be moved from the Intensive Care Unit, I was taken by air ambulance to the private hospital where you met me.

By this time I could speak but I chose not to. There were enough conversations going on in my mind. I didn’t need to have any in real life. As I lay in that bed, I replayed every moment of my time with Silke over and over in my head. Where did it go wrong? What could I have done differently? And every time I came to the conclusion that the only possible way it could have been different was if I had been brave enough to be proud to be with such a beautiful and unique woman.

She was dead because of me. Because of my arrogance and my cowardice. Because I was shallow.

It didn’t help that the nurses at the private hospital seemed to agree with me. It’s a funny thing, playing dumb. It’s as if you are playing deaf too. The nurses acted as though because I wasn’t speaking, I wasn’t listening either. But I heard every word those women said and they helped to solidify my guilt.

‘Must have been showing off, driving too fast.’

‘What a waste of a young life.’

‘That’s what comes of growing up rich,’ said one of them. ‘If he’d ever had to work for his money like the rest of us, he wouldn’t have been driving a Ferrari in the first place.’

They didn’t seem to know that Silke had been driving the car. But that didn’t matter. They were right in many ways. If I hadn’t grown up rich, the story might have had a happier ending. Perhaps I wouldn’t have made it as far as Berlin and Silke and I never even would have met. Or perhaps I would have grown up among people who understood that there are more important things than the ‘right car’ and the ‘right clothes’. Perhaps I would have appreciated that the fact Silke was supporting herself by working at that old people’s home so that she could sing in the evenings was way more impressive than the fact that Gianni’s heiress girlfriend was getting singing lessons from Kylie Minogue’s voice coach. My priorities were well and truly screwed up.

As I lay there in that bed, I thought of a thousand reasons why I should have been the one who died. The nurses amplified my thoughts. Even my parents chimed in with the view that I should not have hired such a fast car. Yours was the only voice that didn’t join in the chorus of disapproval. When the other staff told you about the situation, you didn’t agree that I had brought my misfortune upon myself. You were kind. You told me funny stories. Sometimes you sang as you were emptying the wastepaper basket or changing the water in the jug beside my bed. You even took care of my flowers and read my get-well cards out loud so that I would have the benefit of the good wishes of the friends who would soon forget me.

Once you touched my hair. You smoothed it back from my face. Do you remember? I craved that physical contact and yet it also frightened me. It forced me to be in the real world for a moment and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be in the real world again. I wanted to drown in my memories. Your voice was like a rope coiling around me, pulling me back to the shore. I didn’t think I could make it. I didn’t want to.

When I was finally back at the palazzo, I wrote to Silke’s parents to tell them how sorry I was. I told them that their daughter had meant a great deal to me. I stopped short of telling them I’d loved her. I didn’t hear anything in reply. Why would I? If anything, my letter was probably an affront to them. Me so very much alive and their daughter in the grave.

Meanwhile, my parents put on a rare united front and tried to persuade me to have the best surgeons in the world work on my face. First they made suggestions. I rebuffed them all. Then they told me I was being stupid. Then they begged me to let them help. I refused. My mother was terrified that my face would heal in the wrong way, but I had already decided that it did not matter if my face healed in the wrong way because no one would ever see it again.

The secret room you discovered was always there. When Ernesta the courtesan owned the house, she had the passageway built so that she could hide herself away if an unwanted visitor got past her staff. My grandfather used it when conducting his affairs. Then my father. Now it became my safe place. If I was properly hidden away the rest of the family could carry on as normal without having to worry about me. They soon gave up.

We kept the news of the accident very quiet. My mother told people I had moved to the States. I told her that it would have been better to tell people I’d become a monk. She hired another psychiatrist. I wrote the diary you have in your possession. I tried to kill myself with pills. Silvio found me in time.

My mother died eighteen months later. She had a heart attack. My father blamed it on the stress of seeing me – her only son – in such a state. Though they had been estranged for the best part of a decade at the time of her death, my father took it very badly and chose to stay away from Venice and me from then on. Too many memories. He died ten years later of a heart attack of his own.

With no one but myself to please, I closed the house down. With the exception of Silvio, I let the staff go. At last I could mourn Silke in peace. Until you came back to me.

When you wrote to me about the library, your familiar name attracted my attention, but it wasn’t an uncommon name. There must be thousands of Sarah Thomsons in this world. But for some reason, because you had written to me by hand and not by email, I thought I would investigate further. I looked you up on the website. I saw your face. You thought I never looked at you all those times you came into my hospital room? You were wrong.

I never intended to strike up any kind of relationship with you. Not even a friendship. I decided I would let you use the library as my way of thanking you for having tried to comfort me while I was in the hospital. I emailed to tell you that you could come to the palazzo and that was supposed to be that. I don’t know what led me to respond to your quick reply with the exhortation that you should ‘play harder to get’.

But that was supposed to be that.

Of course, I was in the house when you arrived. I have not left the palazzo since my father’s private funeral on San Michele. I had my breakfast as usual and then, just before ten o’clock, I positioned myself in the gallery overlooking the courtyard, ready to watch you walk through.

I heard you before I saw you, chattering to Silvio just as you’d once chattered to me. You were talking about nothing in particular. Admiring the garden, I think. But your voice took me right back to the hospital. It was a strange sensation to say the least. I was both disturbed and comforted. I felt the minute I heard your voice again that you had been sent to me for a reason.

While Silvio showed you into the library, I crept down the stairs and slid into my secret room to watch you as you worked. You took your coat off. You were looking around with something approaching awe. Your mouth was slightly open, in that childlike way you have.

You sat down at last. Luciana’s papers were in the box in front of you. You put your hands on top of the box as though you were trying to absorb some feeling through the cardboard.

You were so careful. I was glad to see that. Not that I ever thought you would be any different. And as you opened the box, I remembered your kind hands pushing the hair back from my forehead when I was too weak to do it myself. My heart began to ache.

You returned that evening with a thank you note and when you asked if you might deliver it in person, Silvio sent you away, but he did as you asked and he brought the letter straight to me. I know he was curious as to why I had let you into the library, when I’d sent away all-comers for so long. I didn’t tell him that I thought we might have met before. I just told him that you’d written so beautifully and it was clear that you were so keen to know about Luciana, that it wasn’t my place to keep you from her diaries.

Silvio knows the truth now, of course. I had to tell him after the day you burst in and found me. He tried to tell me I should go after you, or at least call you at your hotel and insist that you come back, but I was too agitated. I didn’t know what to do for the best. I told him you should not be allowed back in and then I wrote you the letter, which he delivered, telling you to give up all hope.

But going back to that night I held your first thank you letter, after your first day in the library, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t wait for you to come back the following day so that I could watch you again. I felt compelled to try to make a connection with you, although as far as my heart was concerned it might be the most dangerous thing I’d ever done. I think I started to fall in love that day.

The simple truth is that I don’t deserve anyone’s love. Silke died because I wasn’t strong enough to tell the world I loved her. She lost everything because of me. I survived as a melted shell of the proud young arsehole I was before. Talk about a parable.

That’s why I can’t expect you to want to be with me. I am who I am because I am cowardly and proud. You deserve to be with someone you can be proud to walk alongside. I picture you with a man who stands tall and speaks the truth. I am a small man, Sarah, because I was small-minded. My punishment is to have had you come into my life and know that I have to let you go.

Yours,

Marco

I cried that night. I cried for Silke, for Marco and for myself. What should I do? I now knew that I had fallen for a man who would always, in some way, belong to a woman who had come along before me. He had tried to kill himself to be with her. The thought of him swallowing those pills would not leave me. Would he ever get past that? Would I ever be able to occupy the number-one space in his heart?

We were doomed from the start. I had to make this the end.

Chapter 37

Surrey, 20th January 1934

I have to write this down so that one day I can tell our children exactly what happened at the Boom Boom. God knows I don’t feel like writing now but I must. I left my diary in the hotel. Such a stupid thing to do, but I thought I would be able to go back for it.

It was the 8th of December. Otto had no lectures so we spent the afternoon in bed together, eating sandwiches as we sat up against the pillows and making love three times in the space of six hours. We made plans for Sunday. Otto’s mother would want us to have lunch with the family, of course, but after that, Otto said we should go to the ice-rink in the Tiergarten to get into the Christmas spirit. I agreed that it sounded like a lovely idea though I haven’t worn ice-skates since I was eleven. He promised he would not let me fall down.

Everything felt so wonderful. The thought of Christmas so close made us feel optimistic. It made us so desirous of each other. The little fire in my room warmed the skin on Otto’s back as he lay face-down in the pillows, exhausted after our third bout of lovemaking. I put my nose to his warm flesh and breathed in the biscuity scent of him. There was something so comforting about the smell of my Otto. I wanted to breathe him in for ever.

But soon it was six o’clock and we had to get up and get ready for work.

I put on most of my make-up at home, as usual, leaving only the false eyelashes for Marlene to fix when we got to the club. Otto, who had to do nothing more than wash and comb his hair, sat down on the bed to watch me getting ready.

‘I am the luckiest man in the world,’ he said. ‘Because I will be able to watch you get ready to go out every night for the rest of my life.’

‘Who says we’ll be going out every night?’ I asked. ‘Won’t there be nights when we just want to stay at home with each other?’

I got up and walked across to him. I sat down on his knees and threw my arms round his neck. He kissed me, deeply and passionately. We tipped backwards on to the bed and he rolled so that he was on top of me. He looked down into my eyes and smoothed my hair away from my forehead.