On the balcony of their hotel, Peter stands - an elegant man with the pallor of an Englishman, very dark hair, and eyes so tear-dazzled their colour cannot be told. Grey-green, perhaps, like sunless ice. Behind him, faintly, through the closed glass doors, comes the sound of the house orchestra sleepwalking through Boccherini's Sonata for Violin & Cello in D Major, and by his side a matronly woman in an exquisite cashmere shawl gives him an embarrassed, sympathetic look.
He musters a smile for her. "The sun on the snow. Doesn't it make your eyes water? I should go inside before I blind myself."
Inside, where he hopes it is the musician's lacklustre performance and not his own soul that makes the music sound so flat, and there is Marge, the other half of his duet of shame. "Peter!" she pats the sofa beside her; openly glad to see him, and he wonders how she can bear it. Braver and more generous than he is, she still looks kittenish in her white mohair jumper and scarf; but it is a Siamese kitten, all breeding and bright blue eyes. "Have a drink. You've had enough of the slopes too?"
What he really wants to do is to go to his room and pack. Every moment between now and being at home will be too long. But Marge deserves an explanation, so he takes a martini from the waiter and sits down next to her, careful not to crush her feet - she's curled up, kitten like, with her stockinged toes neatly tucked into a corner of the leather cushion.
"I've been given my marching orders," he says, and tries the unconvincing smile again.
"Oh god," she sits up, puts a small hand on his knee, the heat of it uncomfortable after the chill outside. "Oh, Peter, I'm sorry. He can be such a bastard sometimes. Was it very bad?"
The glass is fragile between his fingers, and the colourless liquid looks more like slime than water. "I've nothing to complain about." The words 'sponging pervert' burn him with remembered shame, but he's been called worse, though admittedly rarely by a man he loved so much. "I suppose I've just worn out my welcome. I should leave now before you end up despising me too."
"You know I could never do that."
He can see the chandeliers reflected in the surface of his martini; false as the crystalline world in which he's been living these past months, and he wonders if it ever occurred to her that his feelings for her lover might be more than mere friendship. He hasn't been dishonest about what he is, but she is something of an innocent. "I would, if it was me. You are the one he loves, why should you have to put up with these incessant hangers-on?"
She laughs, and it trembles the world in his glass. "I ask myself the same thing, sometimes. He brings home the most oddly assorted oiks, and I bear with them because I know how soon it will be over. He needs to feel he can still charm the birds from the trees, even if he doesn't know what to do with them once he has them."
This does nothing to ease the low, burning misery of having made an utter fool of himself. Heartbreak he can suffer with dignity, it's the humiliation he can't stand.
"But you're not like that. You're as much my friend as his, and I won't have you driven away like this. Who'll be on my side when he tries to make me listen to the kind of Jazz that makes my head burst? Who'll come with me to recitals, or help me think of scenes for my book? You can't go. I don't want you to."
"I have to, Marge. I can't bear it." How juvenile it is: I want to go home. But it's the truth, and he needs the truth at present. He needs his own small cluttered apartment, the stench and clear light and mild, English-spring weather of Venice. Music, and the truth.
She puts her own drink down on one of the leather and glass side tables, where it leaves a wet imprint. "He'll... come round. In a few months, maybe a year, he'll say 'I wonder what happened to Peter. We should invite him back.' You'll come then?"
"So that he can assure himself I'm still under his spell? No, I don't think so. I have at least a little pride." It's a bitter speech, and he can see her flinch at it. Though he's angry, it doesn't please him to hurt anyone, so he laughs. "Besides, I really can't afford any of this. Maybe you can visit me?"
"Both of us?"
Dickie Greenleaf in his world? On his threadbare carpets, pushing the sheet music off the dilapidated chairs, and joking because there's three week old bread in the pantry and cat hairs over the single, neglected sofa. Marge will smilingly call it 'Bohemian', but Dickie... Dickie might laugh, charmingly, and inside be secretly tallying up Peter's income, to fling at him later in insult. The 'sponging' remark returns in full force. "Just you."
She gives him her hand, and they shake on it solemnly, and if perhaps she thinks this is a little ridiculous, the gesture makes him feel better. British restraint, reassuringly cool after all the unwelcome heat.
"I'll take you up on that, Peter," she says. "Look after yourself."
It's a good six months, sitting alone at the waterfront cafes, mulling it all over while the gondolas nod against their moorings and the vaporetti slide between the high, dingy walls, before he begins to recover his faith in love; his self-respect. Never again, he tells himself. Never again will he fall for glamorous lies.
So when he meets Tom; fresh-faced, freshly abandoned, and far more hurt than he was - so innocent he doesn't understand even his own desires - how can he help but want to make things better? Tom is real, where Dickie was a dream. Tom needs him. He is afraid to ask, but Peter can see that Tom needs him, and it's a kind of sacrament of forgiveness, to be needed.
Tom plays the piano with such sweet melancholy, as though the music has been new made for him. Peter lays two places at his table, trying not to frighten away this shy, damaged young man. Between them, he thinks - though it may take all the patience he has - they might after all be able to make something beautiful out of being Dickie Greenleaf's victims.