The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

on her door dragged Ellen brutally back to earth. She got up, adjusted her clothes and went to the door. She was greeted by the figure of Signor Sciarone, wheezing slightly from the climb up the stairs and holding two neatly folded towels.

“I forget towels for bathroom.”

Ellen raised a hand to take them and thank him for his trouble. But before she could get the words out, he had brushed past Ellen and into the room. Placing the towels on the end of the bed, he ambled over to the other side of the room, drew back the curtains and opened the doors onto the balcony. Then pushed wide the door just next to it to inspect the bathroom. Slowly he turned to face Ellen again and continued his inspection. He scanned the dressing table, the room, the bed – then smiled at Ellen in a way she found more unsettling than friendly.

“The room need light and air,” he said, moving back towards the door and brushing past Ellen as he went. Ellen backed up nervously against the wall to let him pass.

“I forgot to mention,” she said, made slightly breathless by her nerves. “I will be leaving tomorrow”.

With his hand on the door to leave, Signor Sciarone cast a slightly injured yet accusing look at Ellen.

“You leave us? You no like it here?”

“It’s not that. I need to get back.”

Signor Sciarone shrugged, turned and closed the door behind him, mumbling to himself as he went.

As she listened to his steps disappear down the stairs, Ellen began to relax. Locking the door, she went straight over to the balcony and drew the heavy curtains back together. True, the room needed light. But for Ellen the dark seclusion offered greater comfort. And since the light of the day was already fast fading anyway, she decided to have an early night in bed with a book. She took a collection of Daphne du Maurier stories out of her case and laid it on the bedside table. Not After Midnight. It seemed the perfect read.

She slipped out of her clothes, laid them neatly on the chair beside the table and slunk into bed. Although it was more than a year now since Frank walked out of her life, she still slept naked. The only sound as she lay there was the occasional bounce of a ball in the street below. But this soon faded as the dusk deepened and Ellen became immersed in her book. It was not until she reached the third story in the collection – ‘Don’t Look Now’ – that her concentration began to wander. Set in Venice, it not only seemed so close by culturally. But more importantly it put her in mind of their honeymoon.

She let the book fall onto her chest as she recalled that blissful sunny afternoon just a week before Christmas. They stepped out of Venice railway station to be greeted by a magical scene that gave her the feeling she had just walked into a modern-day Canaletto painting. A waterway teeming with activity, elegant old buildings rising out of the water either side of the canal washed in pastel shades of pink and yellow, and people everywhere getting on and off the boats that drew up outside the station. Ellen was mesmerised. It was the perfect honeymoon. She stood in wonderment, lost in the magic of that moment.

“What do you think of it?” Frank asked, turning his mop of thick brown hair in her direction with a broad captivating smile. There was a slight mournfulness about his dark, gently drooping eyes that sat oddly with the smile. They always put her in mind of a loyal Basset hound. It was the eyes – and that mop of hair – that had attracted her the very first time they met: the sparkle that coalesced with a hint of sadness accentuated in turn by a certain unevenness. It was partly this asymmetry about his eyes that intrigued her – the way they were slightly skewed by a strangely buckled bridge of the nose that lay between them.

As if he’d been shot between the eyes at birth, his father used to tell him.

It was a cruel description that Ellen had found hard to cope with from the very first moment she heard it. But set against this Canaletto backdrop, the intriguing charm of his eyes blotted out every trace of that fragmentary vignette. Made them all the more bewitching with his smile. Ellen could find no words to express her joy.

Frank put an arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. He knew Venice quite well from one of his early assignments, and while Ellen was still searching for those elusive words, she found herself whisked onto a vaporetto, which carried them down the Grand Canal to their hotel. Frank wanted the very best for their honeymoon and had booked a magnificent suite overlooking the canal.

Ellen closed the book, placed it back on the bedside table and began to conjure up their wedding night in Venice. Recalling it now in light of the last months of uncertainty and disquiet, she realised this was also the first time she saw something in Frank that hinted at a certain turmoil within him. Something deep down which she could not put her finger on. And something she had instantly put to the back of her mind for fear of opening a can of worms. Perhaps that had been her mistake.

She had always had a certain dread of the male body during early adolescence – a sense of foreboding and anxiety born from her strict upbringing and the Catholic girls’ school she had attended. A place that had taught her little more than fear and shame. This feeling remained with her in a vestigial form into adulthood, even as she came to appreciate the fascinating nature of manhood in the fullness of time – its immanent power and independence that seemed to invest it with a mind all its own,