Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.
Philip rose, with more of a bounce than an unfolding. Rubbing his head, he probably smeared soil on to his bristly hair, dulling the grey. He had his back turned to us, and seemed to be puzzling over something in the flowerbed, but I knew that whatever his expression, his face would bear the impression of a smile: even his frowns are teased by smile lines. Earlier, he had told me that he was going to cook my favourite risotto for our evening meal: my compensation, he had whispered, for having to cope with Annie.
I knew, and he knew, that he was the one who would have to cope with her for hours while she scraped the remains from each bowl and confided in her captive audience. He tolerates her very well. He tolerates anyone and everyone: his tolerance is diligent, perhaps even enthusiastic, if that is not a contradiction in terms; certainly practised, because of his job. Watching him focusing on his flowers, I was struck that his relation to the social world is primarily one of tolerance: he deals with the world, and then he comes home.
Often he says to me, At the end of the day, all that I want is you.
And, always, I wonder why; why me?
Annie mused, ‘He’s good-looking … funny … kind …’ This lacked envy: her kind of man is a rogue; she is that kind of woman. She decided, ‘He’s perfect.’
I laughed. ‘If he’s perfect, why is he married to me?’
‘Oh, he loves you to death.’
Do I want to be loved to death?
‘Annie, you said that all men are dogs.’
She prepared to concede, ‘Well, of course, you know him better than I do …’
‘No, he is perfect.’
‘So: the exception that proves the rule. You’re very lucky.’
‘Yes.’ Perfect husband, perfect marriage.
Whatever is wrong, is wrong with me.
The first time I ran away from Philip, I went to Venice: Venice, late last November. Venice, on the brink of winter. I told him that I was going away for the weekend with an old but rarely-seen friend, Lizzie, to her parents’ cottage in Dorset: she had been low, lately, I said. The truth was that she was in Dublin with her new lover.
Ran away? I flew. I have been flying since before I can remember, and have seen so many changes: year by year, there is more of everything. Except propellers. And accidents. The only problem with flying, nowadays, is the boredom. Airports are purgatory. I hate that they have so little sky: so few windows, none of which open. The air sticks to my skin as a thin, burning layer. Too many smokers savour a last cigarette in the queues for check-in and passport control; again, as they sprawl in the departure lounge; again, as they pace before boarding.
Passing the time before my flight to Venice, I drank coffee and read the destinations on the screens: my favourite, Port au Prince, that tricky mix of foreign and familiar. I watched names of cities moving very slowly up the screens, approaching their evocative, flashing last call. I watched for pilots: stray pilots, on the ground, always in pairs, just as in the air; always a path clearing for them, just as in the air. Those creases in their trousers, those caps, cuffs, shoes: I have never seen a pilot with scuffed shoes. No wonder, if they so rarely touch the ground, and then only the tiled floors of terminals.
I delayed passing into Departures, into the queue of people who are tense for the alarm that they imagine they will cause even though they know that they have nothing to hide. One of the X-ray operators yelled at people to stop looking over his shoulder for the juddering geometry that was their own bared luggage.
My guidebook claims that Venice has an annual total of twenty million tourists. I was happy, for those few days, to disappear into that immense crowd. The book complains that native inhabitants are in a minority, but I like cities that belong to no one in particular, cities that people have to make their own. I arrived by a vaporetto which veered, slammed into and bounced off each platform of wooden planks, and swayed on oil-black water, the motor groaning like a fog horn. The route was busy, the subdued air of the cabin was sheared time and time again by the sliding door. I envied the passengers their impressive coats. Most were travelling singly, and briskly; busy with newspapers. Several of them made perfunctory calls on their mobile phones, and I presumed that I was overhearing the Italian equivalent of, I’m on my way home, darling.
Close to St Mark’s, I found a one-star, family-run hotel: family photos on the wall amid the obligatory views of the Piazza under floodwater. A tabby prowled the reception desk while a cheerful, pregnant twentysomething recorded my details in her curly continental script. An inquisitive feline nose scanned the drying ink. The building was typically Venetian: tall and narrow, badly lit and poorly plumbed. On the way to my room, I made several turns of the shadowy wooden staircase to a soundtrack of distant cisterns. In my room there was a radiator which was cold, so that my scarce breath turned into translucent, billowing clouds. I went to bed to keep warm, and read for an hour or so before turning off the lamp and falling asleep.
I woke to voices, disembodied voices in the utter darkness of my room. Clear, jovial voices. I took a moment to realise that they were outside, below my window, three floors down in the alleyway. Two men, Italian. I turned to my alarm clock: twenty to one. From the rhythm of the conversation, I guessed that they were saying their goodbyes, patching the farewells with arrangements to meet again and then swapping suddenly-recalled, last-minute gossip: all the usual. What was unusual was that the voices were undiluted by any sounds of traffic; the silence around them, and beyond them, was stunning.
I was there for four days. I did very little traditional sightseeing, avoiding the interiors of most of the famous buildings and all of the galleries. Instead, I walked: in this city of water, I walked myself into the ground. Frequently, I stopped for coffee in tiny bakeries and bars, where, despite my attempts to conduct the exchange in Italian, the staff would reply in English and smile as if my nationality were a joke between us. As I downed musky little coffees at chrome counters, I watched the proprietors wiping surfaces, washing crockery, conversing dolefully with customers, and wondered whether they had come from elsewhere to try to make their living in this flood-troubled city. Every day, I breakfasted, lunched and dined on bread, cheese and fruit from the Rialto market, and developed the predictable but passionate conviction that this was how I should spend the rest of my life. All day, every day, I wandered, going nowhere in particular but purposefully crisscrossing the many, narrow, smooth canals of jade water.
The first two days I was freezing; the next two days I was too warm because the fog which seeped from the sea into the lagoon had burned away into a clear continental sky. I walked after dark, too, but never late because the locals seemed to be home by ten and most of the tourists were daytrippers. I sensed that no one was afraid of anyone else, that there was no one to be afraid of; but I was afraid of losing my way. Even on the main routes, the lanterns were few and sepia.
So, in the evenings I would venture from the Piazza San Marco along the main, broad waterfront, with the crowds of disembarking, homeward-bound Italians. Passing the Doges’ Palace, I heard the dozens of moored gondolas flapping on wavelets. Twenty minutes further down the esplanade was another world: no one but a few dog-walkers; and perhaps a young couple clinging to each other, theatrically threatening each other with the sheer drop into deeper water. Here, I would turn inland and take a detour down the Via Garibaldi – crowds, again, around market stalls, and in hardware shops – before returning to the open water and walking as far as the parkland that my map named as Giardini Pubblici. The greenery always came as a shock to me in the disused dockland darkness, in the far corner of such a treeless city.
By my second day, sore from so much walking, I was desperate to loosen up with a swim. At the tourist information office I was told that I would have to travel to Mestre, on the mainland, to find an indoor pool.
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to swim in.
The woman who was advising me, who was dressed