That March in 1948, it rained nearly every day in Venice. But we still went to the British Consul’s tea party on Sunday, together with most of the other English residents in the city.
We were in Venice because my husband, Reginald, was doing research in the city archives. We had rooms in a villa on the Venice Lido because the sea air was healthier for our son, Davie, than in Venice itself. Each morning Reginald took the vaporetto to the archives and I did my best in the local food shops before walking with Davie along a cold, wet beach. Everything was foreign to me and I was lonely, so the Sunday tea party became the highlight of my week.
Apart from the Consul and his wife, the English vicar was usually there, some artists, a few older people who had left England many years earlier and the occasional businessman. It was here that I met Miss Winterleigh.
“Mrs Hunt, would your little boy like a biscuit?” she asked the first time we met, a few weeks after we moved from Oxford to Venice. “I saved one for him when the Consul told me you were coming today. I’m afraid there weren’t very many.”
Davie did want the biscuit and sat next to her. I watched them chatting cheerfully while a visiting insurance salesman from London insisted that the Labour government in Britain was full of communist spies.
Davie and Miss Winterleigh came to my rescue.
“Mummy,” he interrupted, pulling Miss Winterleigh along by the hand, “this nice lady lives at the Lido too. Let’s take her to the seaside tomorrow!”
After the tea party we travelled back on the vaporetto to the Lido together and she showed me the house where she lived, just around the corner from our rooms.
“Villa Tesoro!” I said. “What a lovely name!”
“It is, isn’t it?” she answered. “Well, see you tomorrow!”
After I had put Davie to bed, Reginald closed his book and lit his pipe.
“Sad story behind Davie’s new lady-friend,” he said. “The Consul told me something earlier.”
“Really?”
“She was an English nanny for the younger children of a rich family in Turin, before the First War. The eldest son of the house fell in love with her and she with him, but he was already married and couldn’t get divorced. So, he left his wife and moved with Miss Winterleigh to Venice where he bought the Villa Tesoro.”
“Goodness!”
“It was a huge scandal, of course. During the war he was an officer in the Alpini, so people overlooked his domestic situation. But in 1919 he died of Spanish influenza while visiting his family in Turin. They buried him there and even refused to let Miss Winterleigh go to the funeral.”
“How terribly sad! Why didn’t she go back to England?”
“He didn’t say. Perhaps her family weren’t too happy about it either…”
The next day the sun came out, Miss Winterleigh became my friend and my real education began. Over the following months she taught me to speak Italian, shop and cook. And then there was the art. I’d grown up in the English countryside with dogs and ponies, and I’d never had any interest. But Miss Winterleigh made every church, palace and gallery in Venice exciting. She told funny stories to Davie and showed us how you could see the same little dogs trotting around the Rialto that Tintoretto had painted four hundred years before.
Once a week she went to Venice by herself.
“Business,” she would say, with no further explanation. But one wet Saturday afternoon in October, she asked if I would come with her, alone. So Davie stayed at home with Reginald and we set off.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“San Michele,” she answered. “The cemetery.”
“I’m sure you know the story,” she said after a while. “About how I came to live in the Villa Tesoro. But what few people know is that I also had a little boy, George, who was born a year before Gianni died,”
“Oh...”
“That’s why I stayed in Italy. I hoped that if I gave Gianni’s family time, they would accept his son. But George caught diphtheria and died when he was about Davie’s age …”
I felt her voice start to shake, so I took her hand and pressed it.
“Well, then I had to stay and look after his grave,” she finished.
We changed boats at Fondamente Nove and I got some flowers, white chrysanthemums, before we continued the short journey across the water.
San Michele was different from the English graveyards I knew. Every grave or plaque had been recently cleaned and polished by relatives living across the other side of the water. Most of them had fresh flowers and a photograph of the dead person on it, so it felt like we had a silent audience watching us. There didn’t seem to be any other visitors there that day.
The rain rolled down the umbrella we shared as we walked to the far side of the island. Finally we stopped before a small grave with a picture of a little boy in a sailor suit staring solemnly up at us. Miss Winterleigh bent down to remove a few dead leaves from the marble and I placed my flowers in the vase next to the photograph. Then I put my arms around Miss Winterleigh and wept.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “He looks so very sad and lonely!”
“I didn’t want to upset you,” she said. “But it was my last chance to show you George. You see, I have to give up his grave…”
Normally it was only possible to have a place in San Michele for twelve years, she explained. She’d already had one twelve-year extension and the authorities said she couldn’t have another.
“But is there nothing we can do?” I asked.
Miss Winterleigh shook her head.
“I’ve tried everything. The only possibility would be if another family member was buried here. Then they could be put together.”
We stood staring at the grave for a while, then Miss Winterleigh looked at her wristwatch.
“You should go to catch the vaporetto back or you’ll be very late. If you don’t mind I want to stay here a little longer to say my goodbyes. Give Davie a kiss from me…”
Travelling back to the Lido, the rain started falling heavily and large waves rocked the boat. I was relieved to be home, where to Davie and Reginald’s astonishment, I burst into tears and went straight to bed.
I was woken late next morning by Reginald.
“Darling,” he said. “Something terrible has happened to Miss Winterleigh…”
She had taken the last vaporetto back from San Michele as a thunderstorm rolled across the water. The boatman had seen her standing alone at the stern, looking back at San Michele. When they reached Fondamente Nove, she was gone. “A fisherman found her body this morning.
A wave must have knocked her over the side …”
I organized the funeral, with help from the Consul. As Miss Winterleigh had said, there wasn’t any difficulty from the authorities about burying her with George. I ordered all three names to be carved on a new stone, together with a different portrait photograph that I found. When I went to the Villa Tesoro it was lying on the dining room table, as if it had been placed there for me to find. At the back stood Gianni, dressed in his uniform and looking handsome but very serious. And in front sat Miss Winterleigh, baby George in her arms, both smiling, smiling out of the picture at me.