Free Passion by Jeanette Winterson Page B

hard but I was shocked. I'd never been hit before. I hit him back. Hard.
    He started to laugh and coming towards me squashed me flat against the wall. It was like being under a pile of fish. I didn't try to move, he was twice my weight at least and I'm no heroine. I'd nothing to lose either, having lost it already in happier times.
    He left a stain on my shirt and threw a coin at me by way of goodbye.
    What did I expect from a meat man?
    I went back to the gaming floor.
    November in Venice is the beginning of the catarrh season. Catarrh is part of our heritage like St Mark's. Long ago, when the Council of Three ruled in mysterious ways, any traitor or hapless one done away with was usually announced to have died of catarrh. In this way, no one was embarrassed. It's the fog that rolls in from the lagoon and hides one end of the Piazza from another that brings on our hateful congestion. It rains too, mournfully and quiedy, and the boatmen sit under sodden rags and stare helplessly into the canals. Such weather drives away the foreigners and that's the only good thing that can be said of it. Even the brilliant water-gate at the Fenice turns grey.
    On an afternoon when the Casino didn't want me and I didn't want myself, I went to Florian's to drink and gaze at the Square. It's a fulfilling pastime.
    I had been sitting perhaps an hour when I had the feeling of being watched. There was no one near me, but there was someone behind a screen a litde way off. I let my mind retreat again. What did it matter? We are always watching or watched. The waiter came over to me with a packet in his hand.
    I opened it. It was an earring. It was the pair.
    And she stood before me and I realised I was dressed as I had been that night because I was waiting to work. My hand went to my lip.
    'You shaved it off,' she said.
    I smiled. I couldn't speak.
    She invited me to dine with her the following evening and I took her address and accepted.
    In the Casino that night I tried to decide what to do. She thought I was a young man. I was not Should I go to see her as myself and joke about the mistake and leave gracefully? My heart shrivelled at this thought. To lose her again so soon. And what was myself? Was this breeches and boots self any less real than my garters? What was it about me that interested her?
    You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play.
    I was careful to steal enough to buy a botde of the best champagne.
    Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervendy wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.
    Her house was gracious, standing on a quiet waterway, fashionable but not vulgar. The drawing-room, enormous with great windows at either end and a fireplace that would have suited an idle wolfhound. It was simply furnished; an oval table and a chaise-longue. A few Chinese ornaments that she liked to collect when the ships came through. She had also a strange assortment of dead insects mounted in cases on the wall. I had never seen such things before and wondered about this enthusiasm.
    She stood close to me as she took me through the house, pointing out certain pictures and books. Her hand guided my elbow at the stairs and when we sat down to eat she did not arrange us formally but put me beside her, the botde in between.
    We talked about the opera and the theatre and the visitors and the weather and ourselves. I told her that my real father had been a boatman and she laughed and asked could it be true that we had webbed feet?
    'Of course,' I said and she laughed the more at this joke.
    We had eaten. The botde was