He smiled. And across the restaurant a woman in the jolly birthday party waved at him – as if she thought he’d smiled at her, or imagined she must know him and couldn’t place him, or just felt sorry for him, alone like that in such convivial surroundings. He nodded, not letting his smile go, then looked away. For all her moments of sternness, how often on their travels had Julia speculated as wildly as he ever had himself about people they didn’t know! Lovers embracing in the Fauchon tea-rooms, the Japanese at the Uffizi, Germans in the Lido sun, or café-table chatterers anywhere. And they’d been listened to themselves, that stood to reason – he taken for a country doctor, Julia had maintained, and she an almoner or something like it. English both of them, of course, for anyone could tell, their voices confirmed as upper class when there’d been curiosity as to that.
‘Va bene?’ the waiter who’d been the primo piatto boy enquired, lifting away the Caesar-salad plate. ‘Was fine?’
‘Va bene. Va bene.’
‘Grazie, signore.’
San Giovanni in Bragora was where the Cima Baptism they liked was: elusive on the train that morning and ever since, the name of the church came back. Sometimes when you looked it seemed that Christ was still in the shallow water, but looking again it wasn’t so: the almost naked figure stood on dry land at the water’s edge. The church of the Frari had Bellini’s triptych; the saints he’d painted when he was over eighty were in San Giovanni Crisostomo. How could it make a difference, not going again, alone, to admire them? Or standing or not standing before the Vivarini Annunciation in San Giobbe and whatever there was in Madonna dell’Orto? She’d be asleep now. As early as five o’clock they were put to bed sometimes.
‘I’m not,’ the girl was saying. ‘If we’re telling the truth, I’m not.’
‘No one can expect to be happy all the time.’
‘You asked me. I’m telling you because you asked me.’
Their waiter brought them raspberries, with meringue and ice-cream. Mallory watched the confections going by and heard the murmurs of the husband.
‘Why have we ordered this?’ the girl complained when the waiter had gone.
‘You wanted it.’
‘Why did you say I should have married Geoffrey?’
‘I didn’t say –’
‘Well, whatever.’
‘Darling, you’re tired.’
‘Why did we come here?’
‘Someone told us it was good.’
‘Why did we come to Venice?’
It was his turn not to reply. Marriage was an uncalculated risk, Mallory remembered saying once. The trickiest of all undertakings, he might have called it, might even have suggested that knowing this was an insurance against the worst, a necessary awareness of what unwelcome surprises there might be. ‘At least that’s something,’ Julia had agreed, and said she hoped it was enough. ‘Love’s cruel angels at play,’ she called it when they upset one another.
The quiet at the other table went on. ‘Grazie mille, signore,’ Mallory heard when eventually it was broken, the bill paid then. He heard the chairs pulled back and then the couple who had quarrelled passed close to where he sat and on an impulse he looked up and spoke to them. He wondered as he did so if he had already had too much to drink, for it wasn’t like him to importune strangers. He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell, hoping they would go on. But they hesitated, and he sensed their realization that he, who so clearly was not American, was English. There was a moment of disbelief, and then acceptance. This registered in their features, and shame crept in before the stylishness that had dissipated in the course of their quarrel returned to come to their rescue. His polite goodwill in wishing them good evening as they went by was politely acknowledged, smiles and pleasantness the harmless lies in their denial of all he’d heard. ‘Its reputation’s not exaggerated,’ the husband commented with easy charm. ‘It’s good, this place.’ Her chops had been delicious, she said.
Falling in with this, Mallory asked them if it was their first time in Venice. Embarrassment was still there, but they somehow managed to make it seem like their reproval of themselves for inflicting their bickering on him.
‘Oh, very much so,’ they said together, each seeming instinctively to know how their answer should be given.
‘Not yours, I guess?’ the husband added, and Mallory shook his head. He’d been coming to Venice since first he’d been able to afford it, he said. And then he told them why he was here alone.
While he did so Mallory sensed in his voice an echo of his regret that foolishness had brought him here. He did not say it. He did not say that he was here to honour a whim that would have been forgotten as soon as it was expressed. He did not deplore a tiresome, futile journey. But he’d come close to doing so and felt ashamed in turn. His manner had dismissed the scratchiness he’d eavesdropped on as the unseemly stuff of marriage. It was more difficult to dismiss his own sly aberration, and shame still nagged.
‘I’m sorry about your wife.’ The girl’s smile was gentle. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘Ah, well.’ Belittling melancholy, he shook his head.
Again the playing cards fall. Again he picks them up. She wins and then is happy, not knowing why.
The party at the corner table came to an end, its chatter louder, then subdued. A handbag left behind was rescued by a waiter. Other people came.
Tomorrow what has been lost in recollection’s collapse will be restored as she has known it: the pink and gold of Sant Giobbe’s Annunciation, its dove, its Virgin’s features, its little trees, its God. Tomorrow the silenced music will play in the piazza of San Marco, and tourists shuffle in the calles, and the boats go out to the islands. Tomorrow the cats of Venice will be fed by ladies in the dried-out parks, and there’ll be coffee on the Zattere.
‘No, no,’ he murmured when the husband said he was sorry too. ‘No, no.’
He watched the couple go, and smiled across the crowded restaurant when they reached the door. Shame isn’t bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.
Mini Modern Classics
RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA Hell Screen
KINGSLEY AMIS Dear Illusion
DONALD BARTHELME Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
SAMUEL BECKETT The Expelled
SAUL BELLOW Him With His Foot in His Mouth
JORGE LUIS BORGES The Widow Ching – Pirate
PAUL BOWLES The Delicate Prey
ITALO CALVINO The Queen’s Necklace
ALBERT CAMUS The Adulterous Woman
TRUMAN CAPOTE Children on Their Birthdays
ANGELA CARTER Bluebeard
RAYMOND CHANDLER Killer in the Rain
EILEEN CHANG Red Rose, White Rose