The Girl Behind the Mask by Stella Knightley Page B

school and my home town and my summer job at the private hospital. He told me about his childhood in the city, about summers spent on the lagoon, winters half-drowned by the acqua alta . He told me about his flamboyant paternal grandfather and his grandmother, a loving, simple woman who was somewhat overwhelmed by the trappings of her husband’s extraordinary success. Still, Marco’s ‘simple’ grandmother seemed impossibly glamorous to me. I told him about my own grandmother, who had pronounced my mother a ‘harlot’ because she dyed her hair.
     
    Then she wouldn’t have liked my mother at all,
    Marco confided.
    Marco also told me about the moment he left Venice for high school in the United States and how the other students had mocked him for his name and his exotic accent, until he broke the school bully’s nose. He joked about it:
     
    I inherited my skill as a boxer from my maternal grandmother. She was great at bedtime stories too.
    I told him:
     
    My grandmother was a wonderful storyteller, too. Those nights when Gran was looking after me were the only ones when I actually looked forward to bedtime. She had a big old book of fairytales. My favourite was ‘Beauty and the Beast’. I think that story might actually have been what inspired me to torture that poor guy in the hospital with my schoolgirl Italian. I loved the central theme of it. The notion that we can all be transformed by love.
    Marco wrote back,
     
    It’s a very nice notion. And I think the fact that you believed it says a great deal about the goodness of your soul. You are Beauty.
    ‘And you are taking the mickey,’ I responded. But though I had yet to lay eyes on him, Marco Donato was fast becoming my best friend in Venice. Surely I had to meet him soon?
     
    Despite my professed approval of the moral behind Beauty’s story – that looks don’t really matter – I set off for the library each day with a sense of immense anticipation, dressed as carefully as someone going to a job interview. Or, more accurately, on a date. My colleagues back in London would not have recognised the smartly dressed woman setting out from Ca’ Scimietta to the Palazzo Donato. I certainly didn’t bother to put on a full face of make-up to go in to the university back home. Mind you, some of my fellow academics in England looked as though they rarely washed.
    On my third weekend in Venice, I spent more money than I could afford on skirts and dresses from a boutique recommended by Bea. She was only too happy to help me Italianise myself, insisting I dump the thick comforting jumpers that had been as much my signature look as that Danish detective’s and wear two thinner layers instead.
    ‘Italian style. Just as warm and much, much sexier,’ she told me. She was right. Without my baggy jumper, I had a waist again. ‘You’ve got an incredible figure!’
    I hugged Bea’s compliment closely. I hadn’t felt as if anything about me was incredible for quite a while. My baggy jumper had become something akin to armour. What had changed? I suppose it was the possibility of Marco’s attention that made me want to come out of hibernation again.
    I was once your classic bluestocking, telling myself what was on the inside mattered most, but that had definitely changed. I wanted to be ready to impress Marco when I finally saw him, as I was certain must happen soon now that we were writing to each other so often. How could we not meet? We were exchanging up to twenty emails a day! And when we did, I wanted him at least not to look straight through me. Every morning, as I dressed, I remembered the photographs I had seen online. Marco, handsome and stylish and always surrounded by beautiful women: the kind of women who had nothing to do but prepare for the next party. I had neither the time nor the money for the sort of grooming those Côte d’Azur party girls could indulge in, but I didn’t want to be the archetypal hopeless academic either. Just because I wanted