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Amy was aware that James knew what he was talking about. He was the head of a department at the Whitney Museum and with an eye that was as refined as one could get. He was a man respected for his critiques and knowledge of contemporary works of art. A shy man, who kept out of the limelight and politics of the art world, he was very much a behind-the-scenes person. An aesthete, remote from the outside world but never from his friends, was how he had been described to Amy. And it was true, you could see that in him, in everything he said and did. It was so much of his character it was even in his walk.

‘Yes, I did.’

Thankfully James did not ask her opinion of what she had seen. In fact he asked no questions at all about her meeting with Jarret, but went back to the book he was reading. He had had his housekeeper pack them a picnic and a few hours later, when they unpacked it and he had opened a bottle of champagne and they were nibbling on fried chicken drumsticks, he asked
Amy, ‘Did you meet Jarret’s friend Fee?’

‘No. He was in Istanbul.’

‘He is the better painter of the two but he no longer paints.’

‘But still not a great painter.’

‘True.’

‘It would have been nice to have met him too. I had such a magical day with Jarret.’ There, she had said it. It was out in the open. James did not seem at all surprised.

‘Yes, you would have. He’s a charming man. Possibly too charming to be a great painter.’

Chapter 7

Amy had several days in Athens and mainland Greece in the company of James, and then on the island of Patmos. It was an island of ethereal beauty that emanated an aura of a greater power than man’s or life’s itself, a halo of light shining down on it. The simplicity of this place rising wondrously from the depths of the Aegean Sea, a purity, embraced Amy with its otherworldliness, and her feelings for Venice and Jarret, in spite of what she might have wanted, waned like the moon.

On her arrival in Greece Amy had, for a very short time, suffered a degree of culture shock. Her first country with an alphabet that was hardly recognisable, a country that lives its life in the streets yet is not Mediterranean. It was to her mind the last outpost of western civilisation, only a hop across the sea to the East.

If it had been difficult to leave Venice, it had been even more sad for Amy to leave Greece. The country and its islands cast a spell on her. She was aware of there being something of life there that suited her, that she wanted to see more of, be a part of. She promised James one day she would return and they would make more trips together to the archaeological wonders the country had to offer. She would return when she had
real time to travel, months, possibly years, to live in Greece. Here she imagined she would find her dream island as James had found his.

He saw Amy off at the airport and it was his enthusiasm for Egypt that spurred her on. That, and because in Cairo were waiting yet again friends of her friend in New York and James’s who were ready to receive her. She marvelled at the kindness of strangers who took her in with extravagant hospitality and respect for her need to experience a broader world than the one she was successful and content in. Through them she was discovering an Amy Ross she had never had a true picture of before. She had never thought of herself as particularly interesting or vivacious though she did know she was neither dull nor boring. She was the type of person who got on with her life but never evaluated herself or it.

Riding through the streets of Cairo from the airport to the hotel was an education in itself. This was her first African country, her first Arab experience. The noise, the heat, the dust, the people: dark and sultry-looking. Women hung from top to toe in black muslin, their dark laughing eyes and nothing more revealed. A few wealthy, upper-class society beauties were very chic, dressed in the fashions of Paris, Rome and London. Men wore caftans, turbans and sandals. The jam of traffic and populace on foot, and flat carts, donkeys and camels, rattling lorries and rusting cars, bicycles, tricycles and motorcycles, the occasional sleek chauffeur-driven Mercedes, Jaguar or Rolls, ferrying coffee-coloured,
handsome men dressed by Savile Row tailors or French designers.

Only a few hours after her arrival, Amy met her new Cairene friends and was swept away to a dazzling first evening in Egypt. A Rolls-Royce sped past the three great pyramids of Giza looming mysteriously under a sky studded with stars to a party in a Bedouin tent in the desert with an array of beautiful and interesting guests.

A ride on a camel round the pyramids at that moment of dawn where the full white moon is still visible and the sun is just breaking over the horizon. Amy sat mounted on her camel surrounded by a dozen other beasts and riders from the party, watching the Sphinx hiding in the darkness of night slowly come to life in the light of a new day. All chatter and laughter stopped among the mounted revellers as this great mysterious being of stone enveloped them in the power of its presence. No one could possibly fail to be moved, changed in some way by the experience of the Sphinx and Egypt entering their life. Amy certainly was. She fell in love with Egypt and it did not take very long for her to understand that she would return there many times during her lifetime.

Open and vulnerable to the country and the people, whom she found to have a sweet and easy nature, she travelled as widely as she could. Her new friends took her to Memphis, which was not very far from Cairo, and she saw the natural scenery of the place: the mighty Nile with its band of green on either side, forests of palm trees, the fauna of the river and desert, above all the
colour of Memphis. Amy would never forget it – something between putty and sepia, as in an engraving – and the stillness and heat. Those things would stay in her soul forever. She would be able to reach down, pull up the vision of Memphis and the monumentally large stone reclining Rameses whenever she needed to be reminded of perfection, timeless beauty, eternity.

She travelled alone, south to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. And it was there when she was watching dawn rise over the Nile that she had what she could only later deduce was a mystical experience of some sort. The light, the Nile, her own emptiness, who was to say what it was, but those things merged and she had a vision of the Nile rising until it vanished into the sky.

Over breakfast in the dining-room of the Winter Palace Hotel she decided she had seen enough and wanted time and space away from Egypt to absorb, etch into her mind, what she had already seen. She returned to Cairo and said goodbye to her friends.

The plan had always been that she would return to Athens for a farewell dinner with James and tell him about the wonders she had seen. She was packed and ready to leave the hotel when a cable arrived telling her that he had to leave Athens for Paris. Her travel plans had been one night in Athens with James and a last look at the Acropolis the next morning, lunch at Zonar’s, and then the plane to Paris for three days’ shopping, a few galleries then home. It was a disappointment to miss James, she had looked forward to seeing him and telling
him all she had seen and experienced, but there was still the Acropolis to be seen again.

Cairo airport was chaos and there were long delays on some of the flights. Athens was one of them. Until the cable from James this had been a magical journey with nothing but surprises and wonders. It had gone smoothly, had all been more, much more, than she had ever expected, and with no hiccups to her plans until now. She had been spoiled and knew it but still felt sad that it couldn’t end without this frustrating delay. The chain of events from one long-delayed flight meant her tight schedule was falling apart. Never mind, she kept telling herself. As she sat in the uncomfortable metal folding chair in the airport, for the first time since she had left New York she thought about the city and Peter. Somehow they seemed strange to her now. Not her holiday or Paris, Venice, Athens, Egypt, nor the people she had met who would stay her friends all her life. She thought about James in Paris, and Jarret in Istanbul because that’s where he would be by now. Would he call her in New York? She smiled to herself. Oh, yes, he would call her, the chemistry was there. She had him in a proper perspective now, this artist who still remained for her the same handsome, sexy and interesting man she’d seen across a dim and nearly deserted room in a restaurant in Venice.

Venice. How nice it would be to spend her last few days roaming the back streets and canals, discovering more of the undiscovered city that George had shown her. One last look to etch into her mind the place that
had brought her that unforgettable day with Jarret Sparrow. How could a shopping spree in Paris compare with that? Well, the travel plans were set and that was that.

In that hot and massively overcrowded terminal hours ticked by with no answers to Amy’s queries about when her flight would leave. Over the crackling tannoy system came an announcement at last. But that was a flight to Rome. It would do, anything would do to get out of that terminal. She could certainly get a flight from there to Paris even if she had to suffer the loss of another look at the Acropolis. That leg of her journey had already been affected anyway by James’s absence.

Amy rushed to the Alitalia desk and with what seemed like an inordinate amount of fuss changed her ticket. The plane was held for her, she made a dash for it, and only realised what she had done when she was buckled into her seat and they were soaring at a near forty-five-degree angle into the sky.

Nine hours later, and thinking she was slightly mad, she was in a gondola watching the sun set over the Grand Canal as she glided up to the entrance of the Gritti Palace Hotel where she was met by the manager and several staff, the usual welcoming ritual initiated by the call of the gondolier.

The very first thing she did on entering the hotel was to hand her air tickets over to the concierge and ask him to change them for a flight from Italy that would get her to New York four days hence. Then she wiped the thought of travel from her mind.

It was difficult to analyse the way she was feeling: excitement, incredible joy at being in Venice again, a kind of out of control madness of love and passion for Jarret, who wasn’t even here. She was re-experiencing feelings for him that had been forgotten, at least on such a scale. Amy was feeling giddy with happiness that she could let go, give in to such irrational feelings and behaviour. It also made her feel incredibly sensuous, sexually ravenous.

A room had been found for her, which was incredible in itself since she had no reservation. It was large and sumptuous with its windows facing on to the Grand Canal. A Canaletto come to life.

The maid unpacked Amy’s clothes while she stood by the window wondering at the view and the fact that she was even here. She revelled in that feeling of being in love. She wanted to rush to St Mark’s Square and watch the night with its myriad of stars take that wondrous place of beauty into its grasp. But it was too late, and she was too tired, too over-excited to gather her energies or even hold her passions in check. Instead she chose to bathe and wallow in them. After a long and luxurious bath in scented water where she got in touch with her body with caressing hands that she pretended were Jarret’s, and came to terms with just how much she yearned for a man, she changed into her most elegant dress and went down to the bar for a celebration.

That was somehow what this messed-up journey now seemed to her: a celebration of her freedom, her capacity to love and be loved on a grand scale. She ordered a
champagne cocktail, and then another, and after the third, alone at the bar, was able to acknowledge after a look in the mirror that it was all there showing in her face, the liveliness in her eyes. She was a luscious-looking woman in love. Never had she so enjoyed admiring glances as she did that night in the bar.

When she was called to the dining-room Amy suddenly felt extraordinarily tired. She asked for her meal to be sent up to her room and there dined alone in front of the window with the lights of Venice like diamonds strewn across the water.

It was late morning when she woke from a deep and untroubled sleep. She ordered breakfast and had it in bed. White peach juice, scrambled eggs and Parma ham, hot buttered toast and strawberry preserve. She had the window open a crack and a light breeze ruffled the sheer white curtains. The sounds of Venice filled the room. At one point during her breakfast she put back her head and laughed aloud. This was the last place in the world she had expected to be having breakfast this morning.

Having finished her repast, Amy rose from her bed and dressed. She caught herself being very particular about what to put on and finally settled for a very full skirt of mocha-coloured suede. She pulled on a cream silk knit jumper that clung to her naked torso like a second skin, too provocative for the shadow of her nipples and the swell of her ample breasts showing through it to be worn without the short cognac-coloured polished leather jacket with its turned-back cuffs of suede and bronze buttons. It was perfect for the weather which
had turned much cooler than it had been three weeks before when she had last been there. Though the sun was out, a great deal of its heat had gone.

Amy took a long time checking herself in the mirror. She had changed, seemed to herself to be sparkling with a new kind of sensuous beauty, and liked herself that way. She clasped a leather belt with an antique Navajo silver and turquoise buckle round her waist. Only her shoes looked wrong, worn out from her travels and ready for the dustbin. She made up her mind to buy shoes in Venice, having remembered from the last time an exclusive shop that had tantalised her the very first day she had arrived from Paris.

She climbed into a powerboat, wanting to see St Mark’s Square from the water rather than bursting in on it from a narrow street. It was a strange sensation being there alone, so different from when she had last walked through it on Jarret’s arm. She had not expected it, but was suddenly sad to be here without him. She was without a man, without a lover. She could not understand why that was so important. It hadn’t been all through her travels until this return to Venice. Now she felt, to the very core of her being, a kind of emptiness, of only being half alive, half a person in search of the other half of her soul. She felt for the first time in her life incomplete. It was a feeling so profound that she was quite shaken by it and had to fight off spiralling downward into a void, at the bottom of which was despair. Never before had she felt such a need for a man, for Jarret. She fought herself like a demon to get back
her equilibrium, refusing to accept that she could be so foolish on nothing more than the chemistry that passed for a few hours between two people.

She tried to reason with herself that it was Venice, one of the most romantic cities in the world, mistress of the Adriatic, not her or Jarret or what they were or were not to each other, that was eating away at her. She began to see the city as both romantic and yet mysteriously death-like, the canals and its magnificent
palazzi
more embalmed than preserved as the tides tried to reclaim them.

Over a Cinzano, at a table in a sea of others set out in the square, she realised that she was taking a melancholy pleasure in the subtle decay that infested the city. But Venice, basking in the extraordinary light reflected off its lagoon and canals, and moving in its very own and special time-scale, was conspiring to make her appreciate the city in spite of her sense of decadence, decay and death.