Tom and Patrick’s Venice trip

Tom and Patrick’s Venice trip is a remembered holiday that exposes the intimacy at the center of Marion Burgess’s marriage. Marion’s account sets the trip against her absence: she first imagines how Patrick will guide Tom through the city, then recalls the tenderness and freedom the men actually found there. The journey’s scenes culminate on Torcello, where the prospect of leaving Venice makes separation feel impossible to Marion.

Departure and Marion’s imagined itinerary

The two men left on a Friday morning in mid-August. Tom had borrowed a suitcase from Marion and spent the preceding week packing and unpacking it. He took his wedding suit, apparently hiding the decision until the last moment: after he had gone, Marion noticed the empty wooden hanger where it had hung since March. He had also borrowed a library guidebook to Italy. Marion dismissed the book as unnecessary because Patrick had visited Venice many times and would act as Tom’s guide.

Tom told Marion that he did not know where they would stay or what they would do once they arrived; those decisions would be Patrick’s. He presented the prospect of wandering alone while Patrick worked, but Marion knew Patrick would not leave him to do that. Reading the Venice section of the guidebook, she pictured their first day: a queue for the Campanile, coffee at Florian’s, a photograph of Tom on the Rialto Bridge, and perhaps a gondola ride. These are Marion’s predictions, not a record of what the men did. The guidebook’s recommendation of a gondola ride for honeymooning couples gives her imagined itinerary an unintended intimacy, while the wedding suit and secretive packing suggest how much Tom’s departure unsettles her.

A private passage through the city

Marion’s later recollection gives the trip a physical closeness that her imagined sightseeing cannot capture. On a water taxi crossing the lagoon at night, Tom and Patrick sat together at the back of a shining wooden cabin. The captain closed the hatch, leaving them private. The boat raced over the black water, its speed making them laugh; their thighs touched and their bodies were pressed back by the motion. When the boat slowed and Venice appeared beyond the small windows, Tom gasped at the view. Marion remembers that wonder, but places the deeper significance in his hand touching Patrick’s in the secluded cabin.

The days that followed had a rhythm of their own: mornings in bed, long lunches on the hotel terrace, and walks through the city. Patrick took Tom’s arm and guided him through the crowds on the Rialto Bridge, and nobody appeared to notice them. For the two men, that unremarked gesture belonged to a freedom unavailable in England. Their ease in public stands in sharp contrast to the secrecy that shapes Marion’s account of Tom’s life at home.

One afternoon they left the summer heat and entered Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Patrick remembers the church’s pale grey, pink, and white marble, and the sense that its surfaces were almost made of sugar. In a front pew, the men sat alone and kissed before the saints and angels. Looking toward an altar image of the Virgin reputed to have restored a drowned man to life, Patrick said that they should live in Venice. Tom answered that they should fly to the moon, smiling. The exchange holds desire and impossibility together: the wish to make their freedom permanent meets a playful reply rather than a practical plan.

Torcello and the journey’s end

On their last day, Tom and Patrick went by vaporetto to Torcello to see its mosaics. The city receded behind them into what Patrick describes as a mirage, suspended in mist; the island’s quiet came as a shock after the clangour of San Marco. Neither man spoke as they entered the basilica. Patrick wonders in retrospect whether he had overdone the cultural sightseeing, imagining that Tom might have preferred Bellinis at Harry’s Bar. The uncertainty reveals how closely Patrick attends to Tom’s response, even when Tom gives him no answer.

They looked at the glittering reds and golds of the Last Judgement. Its sinners are forced into a corner of torment: some are consumed by flames or wild beasts, while others eat their own hands, finger by finger. Tom stood for a long time before this scene and remained silent. Patrick’s account makes the painting part of the emotional pressure of their final day, without claiming that Tom explained what he saw in it.

The return to England becomes unbearable to Patrick. Fear of being apart and of having to share Tom rises until he clasps Tom’s arm, searches his face, says his name, and insists that they cannot go back. The trip thus moves from the ease of being unobserved to an urgent plea against separation. Venice offers the men a temporary life together; the final day makes clear that the journey cannot preserve it.

Memory after the holiday

Marion’s knowledge of the trip is divided between evidence and imagination. Before the departure, she studies a guidebook and invents the men’s likely sightseeing; later, she recalls their private taxi crossing, days together, church kiss, and visit to Torcello. That difference matters: what she can picture in advance is shaped by conventional tourist advice, while what she remembers most intensely is the bodily intimacy and the fear of losing it.

Marion later visits Venice herself, in September, on an organised opera trip to Verona with strangers, most of them travelling alone. By then, she and Tom have taken holidays apart for years. She deflects questions about his whereabouts by saying that he dislikes whatever activity brought her on the trip, whether opera, gardens, or historic houses. Her solo visit and practiced excuses frame the earlier holiday retrospectively: the city that had given Tom and Patrick a brief, apparently unremarked freedom remains bound in Marion’s memory to a closeness she cannot openly explain.