They cut off the main thoroughfare and walked beside one of the smaller canals.
‘It feels so different, doesn’t it?’ Maggie observed.
She looked up and around. Absorbing the colours. Terracotta and pink, a dash of yellow, the deep blue shutters, everything in the sunlight looking like it had been brushed with honey.
‘Different to where?’
‘To everything we’ve ever known.’
The Summit of Life
The Ghost listened as they talked about bellinis.
They debated visiting Harry’s Bar at some point during their stay, the place where the cocktails had been invented.
‘I don’t know if I’d be smart enough,’ Wilbur said, looking down at his sandals and flares.
‘Maybe we should try something a little more gritty,’ she said.
‘I don’t know if Venice does gritty. This whole place is a bellini. One big fizzing peach.’
‘It’s like that book you gave me by the Italian.’
‘Invisible Cities?’
Maggie nodded.
Invisible Citiesby Italo Calvino had been translated into English that year. It was proving a tough sell to customers on the basis that it had no story, and hardly any characters, or almost anything else a person might reasonably expect from a novel. But it was one of Wilbur’s favourite books.
‘Yeah,’ said Maggie. ‘When I read it I thought, if he is writing about Venice, why not write about Venice? Why write all these different imaginings of Venice? But that is what it’s like, isn’t it? It’s like a hundred dreams in one.’
Wilbur looked at her.
His eyes were full of pure, undistracted love.
The Ghost knew that this was it, the summit of life’s mountain. The very happiest he ever felt. Just walking along beside a canal, glancing at the woman he adored.
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
Wilbur’s smile seemed to take that in, and appreciate it, as if it had a taste he wanted to savour.
‘My mam had always wanted to go to Venice with my dad,’ Maggie said, after another moment. ‘Ever since she saw that film with Katharine Hepburn in it. She never went abroad. She never got further than Blackpool in her whole life.’
‘Well, next year we’ll have to come back and bring your dad. We’ve got money now.’
‘Not much. After the wedding.’
‘Well, we’ll have some more by then.’
‘He’s not such a romantic type. But maybe, actually, yes. He would like that. Maybe.’
‘Never going to happen!’ said the Ghost, unheard, behind them. ‘You think you will, but you won’t. Because – what is it they say? –life gets in the way.’
Wilbur stopped Maggie for a kiss as they were about to go up the steps of the Rialto Bridge.
‘We could move here.’ Then, a few minutes later, as they passed a bookstall on the bridge, ‘I could sell the shop.’
