In 1957, Gill Johnson, 25, left London for a Venetian palazzo to teach English to the children of the Brandolini family. One day, at the Venice Lido, she spotted a familiar figure…
She seemed unattached and sitting in pointed isolation, as if the tide had brought her in and plonked her on the beach. She clearly wasn't Italian.
It was mid-morning, pre-season. No Italian woman would be seen dead on the beach before 12.30, even in high season.
I walked past her a couple of times. I recognised her but couldn't put my finger on why. She was about my mother's age, early fifties: clear, smooth, pale skin, high forehead, sad emerald eyes with eyelids that draped like curtains, making her look intelligent and difficult.
Her scimitar-shaped eyebrows and elegantly angular bone structure fashioned a face that seemed both of its day and timeless. She looked like an eternal type of beauty that I'd seen in paintings. She wore a tight pearl necklace, a pale blue, sleeveless, knee-length dress and a narrow-brimmed straw hat. On her lap was a book.
The next day, she was there again, this time talking to an overweight man.
Instead of the short Os and As of Italian, I picked up the elongated and elevated and of cut-glass gold-standard upper-class receivedpronunciation English, the accent of the ruling classes, the in an Oscar Wilde play might have.
