‘Along with the salt and pepper shakers. Don’t forget the salt and pepper shakers.’ Wilbur turned back to Gabriella. ‘But any recommendations would be welcome.’
‘Actually, yes,’ said Maggie. ‘We don’t have anywhere to eat tonight. Would you be able to suggest somewhere?’
Gabriella nodded, with the accentuated concern of someone who was committed to her job. ‘Yes, of course. There is a lovely little place that we recommend called La Zucca. Beautiful food.’
‘Sounds perfect.’
Back then, in 1974, Wilbur and Maggie had only ever eaten Italian food when they went to Mama’s Restaurant in the centre of Sheffield. And then it had only been pizza or spaghetti. When it came to the world, they were still novices.
It was so strange, the past. How close and distant it was at thesame time. How the familiar was exotic and the exotic was familiar. And how the hardest thing to remember about the old was the sense of the new.
‘I will reserve it for you,’ said Gabriella. ‘Tonight at eight.’
And as they headed over to the desk with Gabriella to check in, Wilbur took a quick look behind him. Maybe he was having another look at the flowers. Or maybe he was sensing the Ghost.
The Ghost that was standing looking back at him, not with nostalgia now, but a sense of emerging anger.
‘You really didn’t realise what you had,’ he said.
But Wilbur heard nothing, and turned back to the reception desk without a second thought.
Time
Happiness squandered was painful to look at from the future. But the Ghost tried his best to feel gratitude that he had known happiness at all.
It was a blazing August day.
He was watching himself and Maggie on the terrace of D’Angelo Caffè, overlooking a cluster of moored gondolas, sipping the finest wine they had ever tasted. There was indistinct chatter all around them, softened and unified by the unlikely sound of John Denver singing a country song from a radio somewhere inside the café.
He missed everything he was seeing and hearing.
He missed drinking, he missed feeling the sunshine prickle his skin, the glow from hearing a beloved song.
Maggie leaned back in her chair. Leaned her face towards the sun. ‘This is the life.’
He observed himself watching a vaporetto full of tourists sail by and listening to Maggie talk about Venetian art. She nudged him and pointed to something in the guidebook. They spoke a bit more, then she went back to reading and he turned his attention from the action of the Grand Canal just to look at her. He seemed genuinely mesmerised by her.
‘Why didn’t you stay like this?’ his ghost asked. But really, he knew the answer.
He listened to them chat. He hardly remembered the conversation. They spoke about all sorts. The wedding. Wondering when Charlie would ask Claudette to marry him. How someone walking by looked like Hawkeye from the TV showM*A*S*H, which theyrealised would be playing on the BBC right about then. How someone else looked like Björn Borg. How Maggie’s dad was having trouble with his spondylosis. They talked about each other. They talked about the way Wilbur sat back in his chair like an emperor when he had a glass of wine and how Maggie studied everyone like a detective. They laughed and talked about everything and nothing at all. Their conversation flowed so naturally in the sunshine. They noticed each other with the devotion of astronomers mapping new planets. It was clear to anyone they were blissfully in love. To Maggie and Wilbur it felt this love was indestructible, that it ran deep and all around them, a moat against the armies of time.
Once they’d finished their wine they set off and wandered hand in hand, being the oldest they’d ever been and the youngest they’d ever felt.
They were certainly in childlike spirits.
Maggie began to sing, in a quiet and mock-serious fashion, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. The Ghost felt a mist clearing. He began to recall things from the day he died. Sitting at the piano, playing the first section of this tune. First with his teacher, then by himself. He felt it again. Music as a thread of time, stitching moments together across decades.
The Ghost tried to remember what was happening to Wilbur right there on his honeymoon.
Eventually it came to him.
Of course! Maggie had wanted to go to a church where there was a Titian altarpiece of St John the Almsgiver. The church was just beyond the bridge, so the plan was to head there and then back to the hotel and get ready for the evening.
The Ghost followed them.
It was busy.
They passed smart Italian couples. Open shirts and glamorousdresses. A busker playing the accordion. An old American man smoking a pipe and talking to a companion about jazz.
