Venice

Venice is the destination of Tom and Patrick’s concealed emotional life and, years later, the setting of Marion’s attempt to face what their journey meant. The city first reaches her through the news that Tom is going with Patrick, then through a postcard that makes their contrasting voices visible. When Marion eventually visits alone, Venice is not a cure for the past but a catalyst: she returns from it ready to seek Patrick out and bring him back.

The journey and its disclosure

By July, Tom has arranged to spend every other Saturday afternoon as well as each Tuesday evening with Patrick, who is still completing Tom’s portrait. Patrick also visits the couple’s home on some Thursdays. During one of those visits, he tells Marion that he has persuaded his employer to support art-appreciation afternoons for children at the museum and invites her class to take part. Marion accepts partly to please Tom, and partly because an afternoon alone with Patrick might let her judge him for herself. The museum outing thus creates the circumstances in which Venice enters her marriage as a fact rather than a distant possibility.

The children’s visit has gone well, and Marion has been enjoying the afternoon when Patrick tells her that it is good of her to let Tom come to Venice, adding that he knows Tom appreciates it. Patrick speaks plainly, without apparent shame or malice. The remark catches Marion off guard: she is still trying to understand what Tom’s journey means when a child’s distress interrupts the moment. At home, she finally tells Tom that she knows he is going to Venice with Patrick and asks why he did not tell her.

Tom frames the trip as a matter of freedom within what he calls a modern marriage. He says he had intended to tell her that evening, that Patrick had only asked the previous day, and that Patrick must travel to Venice for work, perhaps for a conference. The stay will be only a few days, and Patrick wants company. Tom insists that he sees no problem in going away with a friend and objects to what he calls her jealousy. As he speaks, he collects clothes from the floor, folds them, restores the contents of his bedside drawer, and avoids her gaze. The orderly tidying accompanies an argument in which he presents the trip as ordinary while Marion experiences its unannounced reality as a rupture.

The city before it is seen

Tom and Patrick leave on a Friday morning in mid-August. Tom borrows one of Patrick’s suitcases and spends the preceding week packing and repacking. He takes his wedding suit, though Marion notices its absence only after he has gone, when she touches the empty wooden hanger in their wardrobe. He has also borrowed a guidebook to Italy. Marion thinks the book is unnecessary because Patrick has been to Venice many times and has already told them about the vaporetti and the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

Marion reads the Venice section anyway. Tom has said that he does not know where Patrick will stay or what they will do, and that Patrick will have to work. Marion does not believe he will leave Tom to wander alone. Instead, she imagines Patrick guiding him through the city: waiting to climb the Campanile, taking coffee at Florian’s, photographing Tom on the Rialto Bridge, and perhaps ending the day in a gondola. These scenes are Marion’s conjectures, not a record of what the men actually do. Their force comes from the gap between Tom’s account of an unplanned visit and the intimacy Marion can picture in its place. The guidebook’s description of a gondola ride as especially suitable for honeymooning couples sharpens the contrast between the trip’s stated innocence and the image she constructs of the two men together.

On the Saturday while they are away, Marion spends much of the day in bed after a sleepless night, unable to keep the guidebook’s phrases and the imagined itinerary from her mind. In a dream she is on a gondola travelling far out to sea while Tom and Patrick wave from shore. She cannot reach them: she is back where she started, unable to swim and afraid of the water. Venice therefore appears not only as a real destination but as a scene of separation shaped by Marion’s recurring fear of entering the water.

Postcard, city, and remembered intimacy

A postcard arrives days after Tom and Patrick have returned. Rather than a familiar city view, Patrick has chosen a reproduction of Carpaccio’s The Arrival of the English Ambassadors. It shows two young men in bright tights and fur-collared jackets leaning on a railing, one holding a peregrine falcon. Marion reads them as both watching and conscious of being watched. Patrick’s message describes the painting and Venice in vivid terms; Tom adds that the journey was long, that the city is a great place, and that he misses Marion. To her, Patrick’s words say a great deal while Tom’s say almost nothing. She burns the postcard immediately.

Marion later makes her own visit, on a day trip to Venice during an organised opera excursion to Verona. She travels with a coachload of strangers, mostly around her age and mostly alone. By then, she and Tom have taken holidays apart for many years, and she has learned to laugh off questions about where he is by saying that he dislikes whichever attraction is on offer. She has never told him that her Verona trip included Venice. The city has become one of the words the couple do not speak because Tom went there with Patrick.

The actual place exceeds Marion’s imagined scenes in another way: to her, everything is beautiful, including drainpipes, back alleys, and water buses. As she walks alone, however, the city fills with pictures of the men together. She imagines them arriving at Santa Lucia station, crossing bridges, and waiting close together for a vaporetto. At Santa Maria della Salute, she watches two young men share a guidebook and finds herself close to tears. She visits the Gallerie dell’Accademia and studies the Carpaccio painting from Patrick’s postcard, imagining his voice explaining it to Tom. These are memories and projections, not scenes Marion witnessed; the narrative makes the distinction part of the city’s meaning.

From private pilgrimage to catalyst

Marion wonders whether retracing Tom and Patrick’s steps is a pilgrimage or a way of laying the ghosts of 1958 to rest. She concludes that it is neither. Venice instead acts as a catalyst, prompting an action she has been meaning to take for years: she seeks Patrick out and brings him back. The city does not resolve the history between the three of them; it changes what Marion does with that history.

Its significance also lies in the contrast between the postcard and the later visit. Patrick’s card offers a carefully chosen image and a vivid account, while Tom’s accompanying note is brief. Years afterward, Marion’s own presence in Venice gives her no access to what the men experienced there. She can only imagine their gestures among the city’s bridges, waterways, and works of art. By making these imagined scenes recur in a place Marion eventually visits alone, the narrative turns Venice into a measure of intimacy and exclusion—and, finally, into the point from which she acts rather than merely pictures the past.