The Palazzo Croce guest rooms were on the top floor. Helen almost ran to the windows of hers and opened them outwards on to the balcony. The Grand Canal lay below her, and to one side she could just see the domes of St Mark’s Basilica and the top of the slim campanile in the piazza. Enchanted, she leaned over the balcony to drink in more of the glittering city. In her eyrie the loudest noise was the call of the swifts as they soared against the blue-green sky and then plummeted over the warm rooftops.

‘Don’t fall in,’ Pansy warned behind her and Helen turned back.

‘It makes the view from Follies look distinctly dim,’ she laughed. ‘Pansy – thank you for inviting us here. It means a lot.’

‘I can see that from your face,’ she said softly. ‘It’s good to have you here. I just wish it was … different. You know what I mean.’

Helen did. It was strange that both Oliver and Pansy, the two most privileged people she had ever met, should be so unhappy with it in their different ways.

Pansy was lying on her back on Helen’s bed, staring up at the white barrel-vault of the ceiling. Ripples of reflected light chased endlessly over it.

‘These rooms used to be the kitchens,’ she said. ‘Being right up here they’ve escaped most of Kim’s Ideal Home improvements. The proper guest suites are on the floor below.’

The room was simply enough furnished, with spare furniture in dark wood and cool terrazzo tiles. Thin voile curtains fluttered at the windows.

‘I thought you’d like to be up here because of the view.’

‘I love it,’ Helen said.

Pansy looked at her, a half-smile showing although her eyes were shadowed.

‘You’re lucky, Helen, you know. You enjoy things so much. Don’t lose the knack.’

Before Helen could answer Pansy swung her legs off the bed and stood up. ‘Well. Better go and clean my fingernails and put on a ribboned frock so Kim will permit me at the tea-table. See you downstairs.’

Helen itched with impatience to walk out into the limpid light and begin her Venetian exploration, but went politely downstairs instead and joined her hosts for tea.

Almost as soon as it was over, Kim was issuing instructions for dinner. Important business contacts of Masefield’s were expected. They were to dress, and meet for drinks in what Kim called the lounge. Helen tried to imagine what sort of room a lounge could be in this graceful marble palace, and then had to bite back the laughter when she saw Pansy’s eloquently arched eyebrows.