I told some of the stories that I’ve related here, about our first meeting, about Jake the trapeze artist, about Connie saying yes at the delicatessen counter of Kilburn Sainsbury’s. I am not a natural raconteur but there was a decent amount of laughter, as well as some muttering and shushing from the table containing Connie’s art-school friends.
Because Angelo was there, did I mention that? In the months before the wedding, there had been some debate about his presence, but it would have seemed paranoid and conventional on my part to banish all her former boyfriends, not to mention that it would have halved the guest list. So here was good old Angelo, drinking heavily and providing, I imagined, a sardonic commentary on the event. To Angelo’s gang, I was clearly something of a Yoko Ono figure. Never mind. I focused my thoughts on my wife. ‘Wife’ — how strange that sounded. Would I ever get used to it? I brought the speech to a sentimental but sincere conclusion, kissed my wife — that word again — and raised a glass in her honour.
We danced to Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of ‘Night and Day’, Connie’s choice. My only specification had been that our first dance shouldn’t be anything too fast or wild, so we rotated slowly like a child’s mobile. It can’t have been much of a spectacle, because after the first few revolutions, Connie started to improvise ducks and spins that left us momentarily tangled, to laughter from the guests. Then we cut the cake, we circulated, and occasionally my eyes would scan the room over the shoulder of a colleague or an uncle, searching out Connie, and we’d smile or pull a face or just grin at each other. My wife. I had a wife.
My father, looking slighter since my mother’s death, left early. I had offered to find a hotel for the night, an indulgence that appalled him. Hotels, he thought, were for royalty and fools. ‘I have a perfectly good bed at home. I can’t sleep in strange beds anyway,’ he said. Now he was keen to catch the Ipswich train ‘in case your sister starts to sing again’. We laughed, and he placed one hand on my shoulder. ‘Well done,’ he said, as if I’d passed my driving test. ‘Thanks, Dad. Bye.’
‘Well done,’ was Angelo’s phrase too, as he maliciously embraced me then brushed the cigarette ash off my shoulder. ‘Well done, mate. You won. Treat her well, yeah? Connie’s a great girl. She’s golden.’ I agreed that she was golden, and thanked him. My sister, ever the keen-eyed critic of other people’s work, hung off my neck, drunk and emotional and gave me her feedback. ‘Great speech, D,’ she said, ‘but you forgot to tell Connie how gorgeous she is.’ Had I forgotten? I didn’t think I had. I thought I’d made it perfectly clear.
And then, a little after midnight, exhausted and wine-mouthed we were in a cab, heading to a smart hotel in Mayfair, our one concession to luxury. We didn’t make love that night, though I’m reassured that this is not uncommon among newly married couples. Instead we lay facing each other, champagne and toothpaste on our breath.
‘Hello, husband.’
‘Hello, wife.’
‘Feel different?’
‘Not particularly. You? Suddenly feel jaded? Trapped, confined? Oppressed?’
‘Let me see …’ She rotated her shoulders, flexed her wrists. ‘No, no I don’t think so. Early days, though.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected. But to me at least, it felt like the culmination of many happy days, and the first of many more. Everything was still the same and yet not quite the same, and in the moments before sleep I felt the kind of trepidation that I still feel the night before a long, complicated journey. Everything is in place, tickets, reservations and foreign currency, passports laid out on the table in the hall. If we are at our best at all times, or at least endeavour to be so, there is no reason why everyone shouldn’t have a wonderful time.
Still, what if something goes wrong along the way? What if the plane’s engines fail, or I lose control of the car? What if it rains?
Viewed from above, Venice resembles a broad-bodied fish with a gaping mouth, a bream or perch perhaps, with the Grand Canal as its intestinal tract. My route began at the fish’s tail, the eastern tip of the city, Castello, the old docks, long straight terraces of the loveliest workers’ houses in Europe. Then back along the northern shore, the dorsal fin, through Cannaregio, where the streets had a sunnier, almost coastal aspect. Through the Ghetto to the train station then down the main tourist drag, which felt like a drag, tourists queuing to squeeze over the Rialto Bridge. How many masks did one city need? I wondered, shuffling along another lightless shopping street, so that arriving in St Mark’s Square felt like coming up for air, so bright and immense that no crowd of tourists could fill it, though they were trying now. By the Grand Canal — the fish’s swim bladder, I suppose — I took a moment to rest. That morning I had seen adenoidal guitarists, ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ performed on the rims of wine glasses, a startlingly inept juggler whose routine consisted of dropping things, but fewer acts than I’d expected. Searching for the terms ‘busker’ and ‘Venice’ on my phone revealed that the city was considered hostile territory. The internet was alive with angry and resentful living statues who had been bustled into motion by assiduous polizia municipale. A permit was required, and I was sure Cat was too wild and free-spirited to submit to Italian bureaucracy. I would be searching for a guerrilla accordionist, someone who hit fast, hit hard and disappeared into the crowd. No time to rest, then. For energy I ate my bruised banana and pushed on, shuffling through the crowds towards the Fenice theatre, where a busker in Pierrot costume sang a warbling ‘La donna è mobile’. Tired now; it was too much, too many people. I burrowed south, hurrying past West African men selling handbags and on to Dorsoduro, the belly of the fish.
After all that ancient stone, there was something pleasingly light and temporary about the wooden Accademia Bridge, and I took a moment to look east to the entrance of the Grand Canal, taking in the view. A strange phrase that, ‘taking in’, implying as it does some sustenance or retention. While I could admire the elegance and proportion of the scene, I was primarily aware of the mass of tourism around me, and also of the extraordinary confidence of the Venetian architects in allowing their finest buildings to teeter at the water’s edge. What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and all that water? But then it wouldn’t be Venice, said Connie’s voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.
I walked on and heard another voice. ‘How is that map working out for you?’ In foreign cities, I assume that anyone speaking to me wants money, and so I continued some way before turning and seeing the lady from the pensione’s breakfast room. I doubled back.