Fascination by William Boyd Read Free Book Online Page B

rings on all her fingers, including both her thumbs, I noticed. ‘Big spender, huh?’ she said, not impressed. ‘Where are you from, anyways?’ She swept the dollars away. I was drunk but I wanted her, wanted to feel that lip stud graze my body. So I told her who I was and where I was from and that I would be in tomorrow night for my champagne. She told me her name was Leandra.’
    I walked down to the beach. It was a Sunday and the Sunday crowds had all but gone, leaving only the odd rollerblader or cyclist whizzing up and down the concrete paths. The Venetians were still out and about: the hawkers, the bodybuilders, the beggars, the tarot-card readers, the monologuists and various other lost muttering souls meandering up and down. I passed a guitarist (a double amputee as it happened) sitting in a barber’s chair playing a slow sequence of chords and the combination of the music, my Seas of Tranquility, the unseen ocean with its wavecrash and the warm breeze stirred in me a profound and epiphanic moment of happiness. I felt that I had reached somewhere significant in my life – not a turning point or a watershed – just one of those markers, those milestones. A benign sense of ageing, perhaps, of the body clock sounding the hour.
    ‘I can see you’re a happy man,’ a voice said. ‘A successful man.’
    I recognized the standard pitch of the fortune teller and turnedto see a tall, lean man in a black fedora, sashed, fringed and beaded as if he were auditioning for the part of a gypsy soothsayer in a pantomime. He held out a bunch of white heather.
    ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’re a Scotchman and I have white heather. I knew I’d meet a Scotchman today.’
    Not a fortune teller, I thought, just another Venice nutter. ‘I’m English,’ I said. ‘There’s a big difference.’
    ‘Oh no, you’re a Scotchman. Buy my white heather for fifty dollars. It’ll bring you luck.’
    ‘No thank you.’ I turned and walked away I didn’t need his luck.
    ‘Give it to Sarah.’
    I stopped.
    ‘Give it to your girl, Sarah. Sarah, the one you love.’
    ‘I’m afraid you’re all wrong. Look, it’s getting embarrassing.’
    ‘Your daughter Sarah, then.’
    ‘I have two sons. Goodnight.’
    I turned and left him, striding away, then slowed, trying to summon up the serenity I had so briefly experienced, but it did not re-occur. The fortune teller’s absurd certainties had broken the mood, and, annoyingly, his words nagged at me as I walked home. White heather brought you luck – why? Who said it did? But I couldn’t help thinking I should have bought his lucky charm.
    Odell Demarco was waiting for me at the site, dressed in cream shirt and tan trousers and cream and tan correspondent shoes. Cement was being poured into the new foundations of the house that John-Jo had designed for him. In front of it and facing the sea lay a gently sloping seven-acre wasteland that I was meant to transform into his paradise garden. His smile was a little tense as we shook hands.
    ‘Hey, Alex,’ he said by way of hello. ‘The moustache – like it, suits you.’
    ‘Thank you, Odell,’ I said. He hadn’t given me permission to call him Odell but it was the Harrigan-Rief practice not to fawn onclients, however wealthy. If he wanted me to call him Mr Demarco then he would have to call me Mr Rief.
    ‘Where’s Yolanda?’ I asked, Yolanda being the second, or perhaps the third, Mrs Demarco.
    ‘Yolanda is kind of worried, if I may be candid,’ Demarco said, candour shining worriedly from his eyes. ‘She wanted me to take this meeting alone. But she did ask me to insist on the thirty-yard pool.’
    ‘She should have been here,’ I said, smiling. ‘The pool is now sixty yards long.’ I placed my sketchpad on the wide glossy bonnet of his car. ‘Shall we go to work?’
    That night in ‘Moon’ I ordered a bottle of vintage Krug from Leandra and insisted she have a glass. I heard the ‘ting’ of her lip stud hit its rim as