Marion’s solo trip to Venice

Marion Burgess’s solo visit to Venice transforms a journey she had long imagined into a turning point in her relationship with the past. Travelling there on a day trip during an organised opera holiday in Verona, she retraces in imagination the city once shared by Tom Burgess and Patrick Hazlewood. She expects the visit might lay the ghosts of 1958 to rest; instead, it prompts her to seek Patrick out and bring him back.

The Journey and Its Context

For many years, Marion and Tom have taken holidays apart. When other travellers ask where her husband is, she offers an easy explanation tailored to the occasion: he dislikes opera, gardens, or historic houses. She has never told him that one of her trips included a day in Venice. Since Patrick took Tom there, the city has become one of the subjects they do not speak about.

Marion’s Venice visit comes as part of an organised opera trip to Verona. She travels with a coachload of strangers, most of them around her age and travelling alone, and goes to Venice by herself. The solitude distinguishes her journey from the imagined visit of the two men: she is not accompanying a partner but walking through a city that has become inseparable, for her, from her husband’s concealed past.

Re-Entering the Men’s Past

The beauty of the city intensifies rather than dispels Marion’s memories. Its drainpipes, back alleys, and water buses all seem beautiful to her, but the streets also fill with scenes she constructs of Tom and Patrick: arriving at Santa Lucia station, crossing bridges, and waiting close together for a vaporetto. Her imagined view of the men turns Venice into a place where their intimacy is visible to her, even though she is alone and neither man is present.

At Santa Maria della Salute, Marion sees two young men reading a guidebook together, each holding the edge of a page. Their shared attention brings her close to tears. Later, at Gallerie dell’Accademia, she studies the two men in The Arrival of the English Ambassadors and imagines Patrick explaining the painting to Tom, who listens intently. The artwork and the strangers do not reveal what happened between the lovers; instead, they give physical form to Marion’s persistent effort to picture their closeness and to wonder where Patrick is now.

An Unfulfilled Pilgrimage

As she walks, footsore and sweating, Marion questions what she is doing: a woman in her early sixties retracing her husband’s and his male lover’s steps through an unfamiliar city. She considers whether the visit is a pilgrimage or a purgative act, an attempt to say goodbye to the ghosts of 1958. The city’s beauty cannot make the past simple or supply the knowledge she lacks; the trip does not turn into either kind of farewell.

The visit instead becomes a catalyst. Soon afterward, Marion takes an action she has been meaning to take for years: she seeks Patrick out and brings him back. Venice therefore changes the direction of her response to the past. What begins as a solitary attempt to revisit the men’s history leads not to a private ritual of closure but to a renewed encounter with Patrick.

Narrative Significance

Marion recounts the journey retrospectively, setting the experience of her own Venice visit against the earlier trip made by Tom and Patrick. The contrast between the imagined couple and the solitary traveller makes her exclusion from their shared history tangible, while the city's familiar sights become prompts for scenes she can only reconstruct. Her reflections also connect a long-standing silence with a concrete change in action: Venice is a word she and Tom avoid, but visiting the city helps move her from imagining Patrick's absence to seeking him out.