Читать книгу Commencing Our Descent - Suzannah Dunn, Suzannah Dunn - Страница 5

‘Decisions? Don’t look at me.’

But this is exactly what he does: he stops sawing through the thin copper pipe as I reach the top stair, he turns around and looks. And when he has looked for several seconds, he says, ‘You’re so pale, you know, Sadie.’

Jason’s own hair and eyes are the colour of charcoal, perhaps a touch warmer, closer to burned wood, scorches on wood.

‘Yes, thanks, I do know.’

My pallor is more than compensated for by hair the colour of pomegranate pulp. I am a lucky redhead, if that is not a contradiction in terms: none of the legendary temper, no incendiary freckles, and my skin lacks that blue tint of exposed bone. Philip says that my skin is the colour of Chardonnay; but he is kind, he is my husband. He says that I caramelise to muscat whenever I catch the sun.

Jason says, ‘But because you’re pale, you’ll always look young. Younger than me, anyway.’

‘I am younger than you.’

He is thirty-five, I am thirty-one. Earlier in our lives, when we had had fewer years, four of them would have made the difference of a generation: he would have been playing rugby on Saturday mornings when I was playing with my dolls; he would have been into punk when I was impressed by Genesis; smoking dope when I was sipping Pernod-and-black. Nowadays, four years is no time at all, but our lives are incomparable for other reasons. He is a father of four, the eldest of whom is fifteen.

‘Decision number one: I want to know where you’d prefer me to run this pipe. You have two options: beneath these floorboards here, or …’ he swivels, to point, ‘along this wall, which is less pretty but less work for me, less of a bill for you.’

I sit down on the top stair. ‘Give me a moment.’

He resumes his sawing: a sound effect for a music hall magician. ‘Enjoy your walk?’

Hal’s walk. Before Hal came, four months ago, I rarely walked as far as the local shops. When I agreed to take him on, I read in a book that a Labrador should have an hour each day off the lead. And I do everything by the book. He lives for his trips to the park, which seems very little to ask. So I take him twice each day. Between these excursions, he dozes on his bed, slumped or curled but somehow tuned in for the sound of my arm slithering into a sleeve or for the change in tempo of my movements that implies that I am going to leave the house. Sometimes he knows before I do that I am thinking of leaving. I have had to become careful, self-conscious of my signals, because I hate to turn him down, to have to watch the droop of his ears, those blond velvet triangles. Whenever I do leave the house without him, his stare – sideways, heavily-lidded – seems to accuse me of going alone to the park.

During our walk this morning, the clear sky was punctured by a knuckle of half-moon. Leaf-laden trees made a foreshortened horizon of green thunderclouds. The hedgerows were scattered with convolvulus flowers like washed but un-ironed hankerchiefs. Hal and I encountered other regulars. Firstly, the childminders: a bespectacled, tattooed man and a hennaed woman with their two battalions. Childminders, surely, because the children are too numerous, too similarly-aged and dissimilarly dressed to be their own. Four toddlers were strapped into two double buggies. Others were on foot, on small and unsteady feet, taking small and sometimes reluctant, even petulant, steps.

Further on, I exchanged nods and smiles with the polite middle-aged couple as he, with her support, was venturing from his wheelchair; he managed a little more than last week. Then we passed the elderly, hobbling man and woman, both of them as arthritic as their dogs, her Alsatian and his dachshund. We were passed in turn by the cheerful, late-thirties mum who strides behind her baby’s plush pushchair and kicks a tennis ball ahead for her puppy to chase. We avoided the wrinkled but elaborately made-up woman who throws a small plastic naked doll for her miniature dog to fetch. Today, there were irregulars too: one of the benches was occupied by a canoodling couple of kids with masses of matted hair and layers of army surplus clothing. They were sharing a bottle of vodka for their elevenses. As Hal neared, they bellowed to their dog to ‘Play nicely’.

None of them will be there when we go back this afternoon: by four o’clock the day will have drained from the park. Even the groundsmen will have stopped work and gone home. Hal and I, too, fail to take the afternoons as seriously as the mornings: in our half-hour we will manage a lap rather than a lap and a half. A mere break, a breath of fresh air. Hal will be contemplative, his nose close to the ground, his concentration as thorough as that of an avid reader.

‘Anyway, this pipe. Oh, don’t pull that face, Sadie. And don’t tell me that I’ll have to wait for the man of the house to come home before I can have a decision.’

‘You could build an Eiffel Tower from these pipes before he comes home.’

‘Still working hard?’

‘Still working hard.’

‘Still at the hostel?’

‘Manager now.’

‘And how is he?’

‘The same. Fine. Thriving. Busy.’

‘Good. Let’s give the Eiffel Tower a miss and hurry up with this.’ He brandishes the sawn-off pipe.

‘I’m a Libran.’

‘So?’

‘So, I can’t make decisions.’

‘You believe in all that?’

‘No. Just happens to be true, in my case.’

Hal is coming up behind me. He is only ever inelegant when on the stairs, his four legs encountering something designed for two. Determinedly digging his way up the steps, plucky but gawky, he looks like a puppy.

‘Hal’s a Taurus.’

‘Hal’s a dog.’

‘He’s a typical Taurus.’

‘He’s a typical dog, Sadie.’

While I rub Hal’s head, his ears, he is butting my hands. I am perversely proud of his prettiness. Would I love him quite so much if he were plain? I did adopt him unseen. His previous owners, friends of friends, were going to live abroad for several years. Having been persuaded to take him, I drove the two hundred miles to fetch him. I had been told that he was a Labrador cross: the look of a Labrador, but smaller. I had not been told that he had the slender face of a deer, that he was all cheekbones.

‘You spoil that mutt.’

‘So? Isn’t life hard enough without a bit of spoiling? And he’s four. Didn’t people spoil you when you were four?’

‘I was a person.’

‘When you were four? You sure, Jason?’

Hal, with his impeccable manners, his love of home and liking for everything to be just so, seems human. He is more domesticated than I am.

Jason’s mobile phone screams from the tool box. During all the years that he has been coming here, he has carried this particular prop: a workhorse of a mobile phone, antiquated and bulky.

He tells me, ‘I’m not answering.’

‘Mobiles are for answering; that’s what they’re for.’

Despairing of me, he snatches the phone from the box, stops the noise, listens intently.

‘Yep. Okay. Six-ish. In a while, crocodile.’

He slots down the aerial, and I think of the shop on the way to the park: For all your satellite and aerial needs. Needs that I do not know that I have. Every day, I resist the urge to go in there and ask, All my satellite and aerial needs?

Jason says, ‘My eldest: could I pick her up from rehearsal on my way home.’

I am awed by his daughters’ social schedules, by their mother’s fixing of old-fashioned girlhoods for them: stage school, horse-riding, hockey club and music lessons. The household seems to run like a finishing school, but the finish is a tough one: from what Jason says, the activities do not revolve around an aim to become accomplished, to learn, but a desire to be equipped: with competitiveness and a sense of fair play, improved posture and strengthened bones.

As a child, I had no place in any world apart from that of my mother’s. Unless I was in school, I went everywhere with her, which was nowhere: the park, the shops. The only advice that I remember from her was that there is nothing more important than a good marriage, but she never told me how to make one because she did not know. Odd to think of my parents now, in early retirement, relatively companionable, apparently having reached some kind of truce.

‘Just one more year of school for my eldest.’

‘And then?’

‘Wants to work in a shoe shop. Says she loves shoes.’ He frowns into the tool box. ‘Does that mean that I love power showers and central heating systems? Suppose I do, though.’ He looks up at me. ‘Do you think you’ll have kids, now?’

‘I have to find a job first: that’s the plan.’ Instantly, I realise how ridiculous this must sound to him. I try to explain, ‘I need a life, Jason.’

‘You have a life, don’t you?’ He is genuinely puzzled.

I used to be a carer: that is the currently favoured term. Caring is the buzz word for what I did, here, at home, for eight years. So perhaps, now that it is all over, I should turn professional. There is nothing professional, though, about the jobs in nursing homes that are advertised every week in our local newspaper. Unsociable hours and low pay. If I had such a job, I would see even less of Philip. Hard work for very little money, he says, and we have no real need of the money, so why work simply for the sake of working? He says that I should do something that I want to do. But this is exactly my problem: what do I want to do? What can I do? I have a sense that I should train for something, learn something, but training is extensive, expensive, and I have no experience of anything, so no one would want me for their oversubscribed courses. And even if I did train, would there be a job for me? My problem is that I have been away from the world for too long. I cannot imagine how other people cope with the power struggles, timetables, deadlines, and expectations, not least the expectation that they will leave the house every day, for most of the day. No, I do not want to do anything. But I know that I cannot stay as I am.

‘You’re looking for a job?’

I wrinkle my nose: ambivalent confirmation. This morning’s cursory look through the newspaper ended prematurely in a perusal of adverts, one of which was entitled, Impotence problems?

Impotence problems? Problems over and above the impotence?

There were other adverts: Hair loss?, Flabby belly?, Panic attacks?

And I thought that I had problems.

‘Coffee?’

‘Wonderful.’

As soon as I move, Hal whips from his prone position. He is due his lunch. What would he have done if I had forgotten? I love to watch him with his food. Fast but fastidious, he laps up the gravy before beginning on the biscuits. His tail, usually wagging, will droop: serious happiness.

I am a couple of stairs down when Jason calls, ‘You love piano music, don’t you. What’s playing, now, downstairs? Scott Joplin?’

‘No, but you’re close. It’s a …’ I flinch from using the word pastiche, ‘… fake, a modern fake.’

Will he ask why a fake, when we can have the real Scott Joplin? Could I explain that but for the work of this particular, later composer, William Bolcom, there would have been no Scott Joplin? No Scott Joplin as we know him. He would have been unknown; dead and unknown.

‘Would you rather hear something else?’ Philip says that my listening to piano music is pathological. He reels from Czerny, Nancarrow. ‘Because I can play you … oh, I don’t know’ … – what was I playing earlier? – ‘The Au Pairs?’

He laughs. ‘Seriously? The Au Pairs?’

‘An old tape.’

‘A very old tape, I imagine. No, this is nice. What’s it called?’

‘Graceful Ghost.’

I am half-way down the stairs when I hear him say, ‘Your theme tune.’ He says it lightly, without irony or reservation.

Glancing upwards, I see that he is already busy again; absorbed.

I love the word grace, how it seems to elude definition. I would love to be graceful. Perhaps I would be, if not for the dead weight of my left foot.

Coming down into the hallway, I sense the house recovering from the presence of Annie, living poltergeist. She had said that she would pop over, but she never pops, she takes root. Arriving on Saturday afternoon, she stayed overnight and until mid-afternoon yesterday. A whole weekend. Just as she did on the weekend before last. The current problem is the break-up, a month or so ago, with her latest: someone called Pete, who, she told us, had been around for three or four months.

When she arrived, she laughed, ‘No one as beautiful and talented as I am should have to stay home alone on a Saturday night.’

While she was upstairs, unpacking, Philip said, ‘She’s harmless.’

He could have said, She’s your friend.

He says that we should have her to stay because she has a flat in London; we have a Victorian terraced house with a garden, close to the countryside, and she has a ‘sixties studio on an estate in a backwater of Edmonton. Perhaps, to Philip, this counts as a kind of homelessness; perhaps I misheard, perhaps he said homeless rather than harmless.

When she had unpacked she came downstairs cooing to Hal, ‘How’s my favourite, then?’

I said, ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Oh, you,’ she derided.

She likes Hal, and Hal likes her. But Hal likes anyone who likes him.

As she passed me, I detected the usual pot-pourri of cosmetics: perfume and deodorant, soap and shampoo, lotions and fabric conditioner. As ever, her breath was scented with garlic, alcohol and chocolate. Perhaps she breathes harder than other people. Perhaps she stands closer.

With the slightest turn of her head, her long, sleek brown hair becomes a blade. On the rare occasions during her visits when she moves from my settee, the cushions are more crushed than anyone else would leave them. In her pillow, in the mornings, there is a hollow of awesome proportions and duration: eerily suggestive, somehow, of a catastrophe. And for days after she has gone home, I come across crockery in unnerving places: a cup in a soap dish, this morning.

All weekend I worried that she would stay and call in sick this morning. She takes lots of sick leave – a couple of days every couple of weeks – despite burgeoning health. In her manager’s office is a folder labelled The sick and late book, in which she stars. She works in her local library, on general desk duties, but also with responsibility for activities, which is ironic in view of her own stupendous inertia. She organises occasional storytelling sessions for children, and a talk or two each month with a display of books on a subject chosen by the Chief Librarian. Alpines last month. She has had this job for a while now – six months or more? – so she is due for the usual dismissal or resignation. She has had so many jobs during the twelve years that I have known her. Once, for almost a year, she was a croupier, and this is the job which she cites whenever complaining of her current situation: Look how I’ve come down in the world.

When we met, fourteen years ago, we were working in a garden centre on Saturdays. Most of those Saturdays are boiled down in my memory to one never-ending queue of customers and an overloaded till drawer. There were days which were different, though, during the few months of the year when business was slack. We had two winters of Saturdays, when we were stationed alone together in the chillier of the two vast greenhouses, a crystalline enclave which smelled of old, cold water in potted soil. With our hands idle but ostensibly ready for work in fingerless gloves, we spent the empty days speculating on the excitement of the coming evening, the coming years. Whenever the screech of the sliding door signalled a customer, Annie would turn, slowly, stately, so that her face was visible only to me, and complain in a fervent whisper, ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard …’, an incantation which would continue until she turned back around with impeccable timing and a winning smile. She was as irresistible to me as to those hapless customers. I would never have stuck those winters of Saturdays without her.

Of all my friends, she is the only one who has always been utterly uninvolved in her work, having always purposefully chosen utterly uninvolving work. All that she ever takes home of her work is her name badge, which she tends to forget to remove: Rhiannon Ritchie. We both revelled in her disaffection when we were seventeen, but she has become too old for this. We both know that this lassitude is bad for her. But if and when I find a job, how will I be any different from her? How unlike Philip, who lives for work: in all the years that I have known him, he has never taken a day of sick leave. His stated reason is that someone else would have to cover for him. He is needed; nothing is more important to him.

This weekend, he and I were Annie’s audience once again. We spent most of our time in the garden, Annie and I sitting in sunshine and shade respectively, while Philip was weeding, digging, planting, pruning. Annie’s sunburn was slapped with strap marks and cropped by hem lines. Her skin swelled around the straps of her sandals, her watch strap, the shoulder straps which were in turn shadowed by black bra straps. On her thighs, a strip of pallor blazed beneath her hem whenever she slithered lower in her chair. She looked frighteningly robust; the chair, worryingly less so.

For a while, early on the Saturday evening, she talked about her latest ex-, concluding, ‘He thinks with his cock.’

Philip was crouching on the far border of the lawn, snipping with a pair of shears, and the rhythm was faultless, crisp: either he did not hear, or he was lying low.

‘And that’s fine,’ Annie boomed, ‘when you’re on the receiving end of his attention. The problem is that the attention span of that kind of bloke tends to be short …’

The regular chirp of the shears’ blades sounded like a slow walk on stiletto heels.

‘What am I saying? All men are like that. Slaves to testosterone, and they have the cheek to imply that we women are heavy on the hormones.’ She added, ‘Men are dogs.’

‘Annie,’ I countered, ‘dogs are loyal.’

‘You’re thinking of Hal, and Hal’s a eunuch.’ She reached to stroke him. Even her hands provided no rest for the eye, demanded attention: her fingernails were scarlet. ‘Ah, Hal,’ she purred, ‘life is simple, for you, eh?’

‘But short,’ I qualified.

‘But sweet,’ she enthused.

‘And of course: with only twelve years or so to live, he should have nothing but pleasure.’

‘Hal, you hear that? Don’t you have a good deal.’

‘Twelve years is a good deal?’

Suddenly, she said, ‘You’ve had a bad couple of years.’ And then, looking across the garden at Philip, ‘You’re so lucky, to have him.’

He was lunging into the long grass with each snap of the steel jaws as if he were trying to catch something.

‘I know, I know.’

Closing my eyes, I detected the scent of the honeysuckle that Philip had planted for me. The white wisteria had finished flowering; Philip planted that for me as well. Opening my eyes, I saw the pastel Icelandic poppies that were mine too. And behind, indoors, at the south-facing sash window, my terracotta-potted banana tree: a present from Philip. I had wanted that plant not for bananas, of course, but for the leaves: the broad, thick, bottle-green leaves typical of a tropical plant, but with irregular marks that look so endearingly artificial they could have come from brushstrokes.

It was midsummer’s eve, but suddenly I was thinking of its shadow, the winter solstice; some lines from a Donne poem:

He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot

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 and made up like an air stewardess, drew my attention to the map beneath the glass surface of the desk. She tapped three specific areas, announcing with an air of efficiency, ‘One, two, three.’

‘Times?’ I asked, unnecessarily pidgin. ‘Open?’

She shrugged elaborately, and her gaze switched to the person who was behind me. But one of her colleagues stepped towards me. ‘Sports centre?’ she checked.

I shook my head, specified, ‘Swimming pool.’

The tip of a pink-painted fingernail landed on the glass and scratched circles of deliberation before skidding to the far south-west of the island of La Giudecca. ‘Here,’ she said, dubiously, then a little more decisively, ‘yes, here.’

‘There?’ Perilously close to the island marked inceneritore was a small extension of the furthest inhabited island.

Smiling, she reached for a phone and a phone book in which she re-enacted the ritual of the fingernail for some time and with increasing ferocity before she was satisfied. Then, having dialled, she had a brief conversation which sounded like a blazing row before she turned back to me with a slip of paper on which she had scribbled some days and times. Bashing the paper with the busy nail, she explained, ‘Open for the public.’

And so that was why, on my second day in Venice, I went out to Sacca Fisola, home to many of the workers. I travelled on a vaporetto away from the city into the wide Canale della Giudecca, the sludge-coloured water churned by a wind from the sea. When I reached the island and stepped from the wooden platform on to dry land, I bumped into a man who was running with a baby in a pushchair. Behind me, I heard the vaporetto perform a slow, aquatic equivalent of a skid, the ringing of the bollard by the rope lasso, the cheers of the crowd on deck in reply to his breathless thanks.

To cross the island, I took paths across patchy communal lawns and around blocks of flats which were concrete but comfortably low. In the shadows, children played ball, and above them, laundry flared on balconies. Every step of the way, I was scrutinised by cats; dozens of cats, marooned but content. I imagined a life for myself, there. On the far shore was a small, bridged swamp beyond which was a brick building. And that was how I came to spend half an hour swimming lengths in a brand new indoor glass-walled pool on the tip of an ancient, convoluted, and sinking city.

For four days, I never once looked at a painting and there was no one with me to know. Despite my aversion to sightseeing, though, I did read my guidebook from cover to cover, and, occasionally, I was enticed. I went to see the church which had a keel for a roof and loomed from Campo Francesco Morosini like a capsized ship; the work of ship-builders during a slack period. My only serious excursions were to the Basilica. Heeding the guidebook, I returned at various times of day to see the mosaic-encrusted ceilings and walls in differently-angled daylight. Mostly, they were lit by their own gold: that half a square mile of biblical scenes begun in the twelfth century and not completed until the nineteenth. I loved the thin but muscular angels, prophets, disciples and saints of the early scenes, with their cheekbone-sharpened scowls, ramrod spines and strappy sandals. By the fifteenth century, the Virgin Mary had developed jointed fingers and a slouch. The few nineteenth-century mosaics featured crowds of pastel-coloured characters who were swooning, reclining, or lunging with spears. As I paced the intricately patterned and unevenly worn floors, the only women who appeared in the scenes above me were the many Marys and a lone thirteenth-century Salome with a slinky, scarlet, furtrimmed dress, a suggestion of high heels and a pronounced wiggle to her hips.

I was inside another church when I realised what had happened to me. I was trawling the distant, dilapidated Cannaregio, looking through a pane of glass at something tiny and white that my guidebook told me was St Catherine’s foot. That was when I realised: if anyone from home pushed through the door and glanced over, they would almost certainly fail to see me. They would see somebody, an anonymous body, but not me, because I was so unlikely to be there, on my own, peering at a relic in the chilly gloom of an unexceptional church in a work-a-day area of Venice. I was invisible, I had disappeared.

The only traces of my disappeared days are in some of the thousands or millions of photos taken by my fellow tourists. In those photos, there are pieces of me – perhaps a turning shoulder, the toe of a shoe, a swing of my hair – and they are all over the world, making a worldwide splintered mosaic of my disappearance. There was something else that I realised: Venice had become mine, mine alone rather than the place where Philip and I had had our honeymoon. Never once, for me, was Venice missing Philip; never once did I miss him.

Pondering, yesterday, that first disappearance of mine, reminded me of George, his old photo. ‘I’ve found a photo,’ he told me, last week, ‘1942 written on the back. A close-up of me, but my sister’s beau is there: his arm, his shoulder, the side of his head. I was ten or eleven, and he used to take me fishing, bike-riding, exploring. I wonder, now, whether he did all that to impress her. He was the brother I never had; I worshipped him. I had two sisters, older, outgoing girls, marvellous. Then suddenly he never came to our house again. I don’t know which of them had the cause for complaint, or why. For years, I was desperate to see him again, hoped I’d bump into him. Never did. When I came across that photo, the other day, I wondered what became of him, and there was no one to ask.’

With some trepidation, I asked, ‘Your sisters?’

‘One’s dead – years ago – and the other, I’m afraid, can’t remember her own name. I hope to God that I don’t go the same way.’

I had first met George in the library, a couple of months ago, in the tiny photocopying room beyond the reference section. Taped to the back of the door was the handwritten puzzle, Do you have your original?, which made sense when I raised the lid and found a local history pamphlet. The cover illustration was an old photograph of what is now the town’s General Infirmary, but the title was The Workhouse.

‘Sorry.’ Someone had come into the doorway, was reaching with a liver-spotted hand for the pamphlet.

I looked back at the illustration, squinted at the familiar but shadowed landmark.

‘You didn’t know, did you, that the hospital was once the workhouse.’ This was a statement rather than a question, but surprised.

I smiled, amenable. ‘I didn’t, no.’

He was tweedy, tidy, balding, bespectacled; his accent was local, rural. ‘Oh, Gawd, yes,’ he winced, ‘I hated going there.’

‘Oh.’ Ah, a madman: the reference room’s resident madman.

‘With my job, I mean.’

I calculated: if he was in his sixties, he would have begun work between forty and fifty years ago. Was there still a workhouse in this town during the ‘forties or ‘fifties?

‘What was your job?’

‘Policeman.’

‘Oh.’ Instinctively, I focused on the room beyond him, on escape.

‘Well, detective.’

I had to admit, ‘You must have seen some things,’ and for a moment I was truly envious.

‘Yes,’ his tone echoed mine; but behind his square, goldrimmed lenses, the pale eyes had a reflective glaze. ‘I was never bored. Sounds odd, because I had some pretty awful jobs – I worked with a coroner for a while – but there was never a moment that I didn’t enjoy. And not many people can say that of their work.’ Folding his arms, he contemplated me. ‘And I liked the people: the villains, I mean. They had some stories to tell; when I think of the statements that I took …’ He shrugged.

‘Must have been hard work.’

‘Oh, no. my father – who was also a policeman, like his own father – said that the force was ideal for men who didn’t want to work. My reason for joining was the house: in those days, we were given a house.’

‘Oh.’ Not a bad reason.

‘But my father was right about the police force as the last refuge for mavericks.’

‘Really?’ I tried to hide my scepticism with a smile.

‘Oh, yes.’

Carefully polite, I ventured, ‘And you’d think the opposite was true.’

‘Would you?’ A widening of his eyes; eyes which, I suddenly realised, had been watching mine ever since he had appeared in the doorway. Was he humouring me? ‘You don’t watch those telly chaps?’

‘You’re telling me that real detectives are like Morse?’

‘Well, to be honest with you, I don’t see many of those serials; only in passing, because my wife watches. But, yes, detectives do everything their own way. Or did.’

‘Not nowadays?’

‘Well …’ he shrugged, ‘there have been changes.’

‘I can imagine.’ I even knew the word: rationalisation.

He stepped backwards through the doorway, apologising. ‘I’ve been rambling, I’ve kept you from your photocopying.’

‘Oh, no, no, not at all,’ and I was surprised that this was true. I wanted him to tell me more.

He asked, ‘Do you work? Or perhaps you’re at home with children?’

‘No children. I’m looking for work.’

‘I don’t envy you. One of my sons has been unemployed for a year, and he’s bored brainless, poor sod. Me, I’m ten months into retirement and finding something to do every day. Somewhere to go or something to do, or to read, to look up.’ He held the pamphlet aloft.

‘Mustn’t keep you.’

But a week or so later, we came across each other in the park, and he invited me to join him in the café.

‘By the way, I’m harmless,’ he reassured me, laughing. ‘Too old to be otherwise.’

Yesterday, Annie left me unsettled, so I decided to drop in on George, hoping for a serene half hour with him in his garden. But when he came to the door, he said, ‘I’ve a chap, here, from London, he’s come for some stories from me.’

‘Stories?’

‘Of work. Of working in the police force. Oral history. He’s taping me.’

I stepped back off the doorstep, but he insisted, ‘No, we’re finishing up, he has a train to catch. Two minutes, and then you and I can make some tea and take a tray into the garden.’

Hal and I followed him into his front room. The historian, in an armchair in the corner, was middle-aged and dressed in a dark suit. Looking up into sunshine, his small round lenses became medallions. He rose, tall amid the armchairs, and George began the obligatory chant, ‘Dr Robinson, Sadie Summerfield; Sadie, Dr Robinson.’

The man’s smile looked like a wince. I wished that he had stayed in his armchair, that George had not been provoked to compere this display; I could have slipped into the room. I dreaded looking down to see the fleece of Hal’s blond fur on those black trousers. The man was holding one of his hands towards me. I hate to shake hands, I become all thumbs; I hate the judgements that people make from handshakes. He said his first name, which I missed because he spoke quietly and I was saying hello. His hand had come and gone from mine before I had noticed.

I sat down; he sat down; Hal went towards him and had his head stroked. The hand was unmarked, ivory; the nails, too. Hal returned to me and lay down, panting close to the microphone on the coffee table. George settled into his chair. The interviewer leaned forward and pressed a switch on the tape recorder.

‘As I was saying,’ George told him, ‘this chap was well known to us.’

Watching the historian’s black wool sleeve scrape over a white cuff, I wondered why anyone would wear a suit in such weather and then not even remove the jacket in a stiflingly double-glazed, net-curtained, upholstered room. His face, though, was untouched by heat. Even the pink of lips was missing because he seemed to have none, he had a mere line for his mouth. He was colourless in a room slapped with sunshine, splashed with chintz, dotted with vases. Looking downwards, head inclined in listening pose, he was eerily motionless in the company of animated monologue and convulsive canine panting. He could have been a black-and-white photograph of a person, he was no more than an arrangement of shadows, the smallest and darkest of which resembled the indentation of a fingertip in the inner corner of each eye. By contrast, his temples shone below a receding hairline.

‘He used to go into the countryside and pick this moss which is important to florists, then he’d come into a town when the florist had shut up shop for the day, he’d go next door and ask if he could leave Mrs Bloggs’ order of moss with them, and would they pay him the two quid or whatever? The following day, of course, Mrs Bloggs breaks the news to her neighbour that she’s never heard of this man or his moss.’

A tightening of one corner of the interviewer’s mouth, the screwing down of a smile, then he glanced at me and I saw how all his colour was in his eyes: china blue; very dark, for a blue.

‘And he did the same with blackberries and greengrocers, in season. Hard for us to keep the evidence, in those cases. I suspect that many shopkeepers didn’t complain, but some did. I was never particularly interested in bringing him in, I wasn’t going to go and look for him, I knew that he was around, so when we’d had a lot of complaints, I’d contact the spike –’

‘Spike?’ the interviewer queried.

‘Workhouse. And I’d ask them to let me know when he turned up. And he always turned up, for the winter. He knew that I’d come for him, and then he’d be sent down, which was what he wanted because then he had food and shelter for the winter.’

I shuddered to think of that hopeless trading of workhouse for prison.

‘Mind you, in the end, a judge lost patience and sent him down for three years – three years, quite unnecessary – and I never came across him again.’

Suddenly the session seemed to have finished: the historian was packing away his paraphernalia, going for his train.