When they took her body from the water there were stones in her pockets. How could she think a few stones would be enough to weigh her down and carry her to the bottom? Surely she should have known the basic physics. Had she been his wife for nothing? What sank her, he must suppose, was the weight not of stone but of unhappiness and despair. Of which he knew nothing. Nothing? Not an inkling? No.
      And the girl, now, the girl in Venice, Alba, was she Dottie’s ghost, come back somehow to comfort him? Once, many years later, he saw her again — Alba, I mean, not Dorothy, for he sees her every day, in a manner of speaking. This sighting took place not in Venice but some other small land-locked Italian city, Siena, Lucca, Mantua, he cannot remember which. He was sure it was she, although it was the merest glimpse he had of her, in the street, in the midst of shuffling crowds. She looked no older than she did that afternoon in the house under the Salute, but she was changed, greatly changed. She was in a wheelchair, being pushed by another young woman, short and round and angry-seeming, with a frizz of red hair like so many filaments of copper wire bristling with electricity. This second person also Adam was convinced he recognised. Was she not there, in the background, that day in Venice, when he was trying to leave and got into a wrangle over money with the Count? The Count though firm about his fee remained amusedly forbearing, showing the faintly rueful pained smile of an adult being haggled with by a clamorous child over sweets, while, yes, there behind him this red-headed fat young woman prowled the room in seeming anger, smoking a long cigarette and ejecting smoke in thin quick jets like squirts of venom. How strange, the way they come and go, memory’s figments. Anyway, the wheelchair in which Alba sat, or better say was held fast, was of the old-fashioned kind, black, with a hoop attached to the wheels on either side for the occupant to grasp and propel herself onwards, or backwards, for that matter , and two handles behind should she need to be pushed, which evidently she did. She was clutching the padded arms of the chair and leaning forward urgently, her upper body twisted tensely a little to one side, as if the red-head had set off with her unexpectedly while she was in the act of trying to pull herself up forcibly out of the seat. Her feet, with those slightly splayed blunt toes that he surprised himself by remembering clearly, were braced on the foot-rests, as if she might be about to make another urgent attempt at leaping up and effecting an escape. She wore, heartbreakingly, a pair of transparent cheap pink sandals. Her look of thrilled expectancy that he had remarked that afternoon in front of the god had become one of angry distraction; the marvellous thing she had been waiting for would now not come. Her lips moved in a slack rapid mumbling, like those of a stricken penitent in the confessional. He might have hailed her, might have followed after the two of them and accosted them, but what would he have said, what done? Instead, he went on standing there in the lemony sunlight of the Italian noon, and saw again Venice in winter, the murky air and the wheeling gulls and old Charon crooning for his coin.

End

 
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