Page 79 of Kills Well with Others

We eased out of the house and made our way slowly through the alleyways of the Dorsoduro. Shopkeepers were hosing off the stones in front of their stores, taking deliveries, raising metal shutters. Mothers—and a few fathers—walked their children to school, quizzing them about alphabets and times tables. Early-bird tourists were also starting their days, emerging from albergos with cameras looped around their necks and maps flapping. We climbed half a dozen bridges, pausing at each to watch the morning traffic picking up on the canals. Even first thing in the morning, Venice doesn’t buzz; it shimmers, the heart of it beating with its own rhythm unlike anywhere else in the world. That morning, I like to think it was beating for us.

We were early, of course. The museum didn’t open until tenam, but we’d bought pastries and we sat on a step outsideand shared the box, stuffing ourselves with maritozzi, each one bursting with cream we licked off our fingers.

As Nat and Mary Alice scrapped over the last pastry, Helen’s phone rang. She glanced at the name on the screen and smiled as she sent it to voicemail.

“I really am sorry about your house burning down,” I said after a minute.

“Don’t be. I’ve been thinking of a few improvements I could make if I rebuilt it from the ground up—without any ghosts this time.” Her expression was serene, like a woman who’d finished a good book and was ready to leave that particular story behind.

“Oh?”

She nodded. “It’s time to let them go, I think—Kenneth, Constance. They may be gone, but I’m still here. I’d forgotten that for too long, but I’m ready for some changes. For starters, I’m going to put in heated floors and a plunge pool in the basement.”

“That sounds expensive,” I noted.

“Naomi and I had a comprehensive discussion on the subject of money before she left,” Helen told me in a silky voice. “I think she understands what it will take to do right by us.”

I liked the sound of that. “Rebuilding Benscombe will take a while. Where will you stay in the meantime?” I asked innocently.

“I’m sure I can find a spare bed,” she said, blushing like a teenager.

I bumped her shoulder with mine. A thrust of pain in my ribs reminded me of what I’d put my body through in the lastfew days, and I thought of our little house in Greece with a longing I’d never felt before. It was time for a good, long rest on an island of herb-scented breezes set in seas once sailed by the sons of the gods.

Helen bumped me back. “You should make an honest man of him,” she said. “Does Taverner ever propose?”

“He knows better,” I told her. “We’re good. We’re forever. Just as we are.”

Just then the guard approached the gate and I took Helen’s hand to help me get to my feet. “Worry about your own love life,” I said with a grin. “And send me a postcard of theMannekin Pis.”

When the guard finally opened the gate, we went inside and paid our admission, the first visitors of the day. He looked appalled at the bottle of champagne—probably because it wasn’t good Italian prosecco—but a fifty-euro note bought his approval. I didn’t need to look at the map to know where to go. I’d been there before.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is housed in a small palazzo right on the Grand Canal. It’s the kind of place that makes you think being stupidly wealthy is maybe not a bad thing at all. It’s a little jewel, full of modern art that old Peggy herself chose with a meticulous eye. Masterpiece after masterpiece in room after room, each one selected for its power, its unexpectedness. You could lose yourself for hours in front of any of them.

But we ignored them all. Instead, we walked straight through the dining room to where she hung. Leonor Fini’sShepherdess of the Sphinxes. It had been painted in 1941, when the second world war was gouging fresh scars into the landscaped face ofEurope. The painting showed a similar setting, a bleak and featureless expanse painted in deep, rich colors to contrast with the emptiness. It presented a herd of sphinxes—not the Egyptian kind with lion faces. These were the Greek sort, with the torsos of beautiful women grafted onto the bodies of lionesses. They were wild in their ferocity, absolutely untamable.

And in the center stood the shepherdess herself, a fantastical figure striding through the field with her crook. She had the kind of big hair a 1980s supermodel would have envied, and a taut, muscular body in a silvery garment shaped like a strappy bathing suit. Around the sphinxes were scattered the remains of the men they had devoured, nothing but assorted bones and scraps of humanity. The leftovers reduced to litter. But they weren’t ashamed, those sphinxes. They arched their backs and tossed their manes, and above them all, their shepherdess looked at them fondly, with pride. She didn’t despise them for what they were. She knew they were simply being true to their nature. Some creatures are born to destroy.

The cork made a gentle hiss as I eased it out of the bottle. Helen had packed a cluster of plastic cups into her Birkin and I poured out a bit of fizz for each of us. The champagne foamed like the tide of the Adriatic, then ebbed.

I raised my cup. “To Constance Halliday. The original shepherdess. For teaching her sphinxes that we are all necessary monsters.”

“To Constance and the necessary monsters,” the others said.

We touched our cups together and drank.

The champagne wasn’t icy and the cups weren’t crystal, but it was enough.