‘It’s amazing, Matt.’ I stand in a daze at the long windows. ‘It’s unreal.’

The louvred shutters are fastened back, revealing the broad sweep of the Grand Canal in Venice. The sunlight glimmers and gleams in streaks across the moving water below, stirred into life by a dozen boats of all sizes, passing at all speeds. A low breeze carries the tang of brine. Voices call, distant, soft with lilting Italian. On the far side, the fabric of the tall, thin buildings that face ours is crumbling with age.

Matt, coming up behind me, slips his arms round my waist and kisses the top of my head.

‘See that big dome, there on the left?’ He lifts a hand to point. ‘On that spit of land, sticking out into the water. That’s Santa Maria della Salute. One of the plague churches. Sixteen something.’

I crane to see. ‘Plague churches?’

His breath is warm in my hair. ‘It came on the ships. Decimated the population. Anyone who showed signs of it was shipped out to an isolated island, out there in the Lagoon. Rather a brutal sort of quarantine but it worked. When it was over, the survivors built churches to thank God. That’s one of them.’

I twist round to him. ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

He smiles and lowers his face, touching the tip of his nose to mine.

You run in from the adjoining room, eyes shining and throw yourself between us.

‘Mummy, come on!’ You tug at my hand, pull me after you into the small second bedroom. Bear sits on the pillow, propped up by pink satin cushions. An oil painting, an old-fashioned scene of a regatta on the Grand Canal, with the Rialto in the background, hangs grandly over the bed. Your shoes, already kicked off, lie on a sheepskin rug. Your coat is abandoned on an antique chair with a plush red seat and gilded wooden back.

I smile to myself. ‘Do you like Venice?’

You nod, jump onto the bed and bounce there. ‘It’s springy.’

I wonder how much of this you’ll even remember.

‘We must say a big thank you to Uncle Matt. Remember? This is his treat.’

I look round at the antique furniture. The walnut wardrobes with ornately carved doors and gold handles. The polished side tables with spindly legs. The mirrors with massive frames, which bounce reflections of the sunshine from one to another across the room. Heaven knows what it all cost. Matt just waved me away when I offered to pay our share.

‘Can we go out?’ You’re on your feet again, manic with excitement. ‘Can we?’

I nod. ‘Let’s go and explore.’

---

That first afternoon, Matt takes us to a café in St Mark’s Square and we sit right there at the edge of the Piazza, gazing out across the vastness of the square towards the Basilica. A string quartet plays behind us, fighting against the noise of declaiming tour guides and the chatter of tourists. Matt orders drinks in Italian from a waiter.

When the glasses arrive, you point past your cloudy lemonade to our glasses, your forehead crumpled with interest.

‘Fizzy orange.’ You look at me. ‘Is that yours?’

‘They’re spritzers.’ Matt lifts his glass to show you. Light pours through the glass, turning the colour to fire. ‘They’re for grown-ups. Don’t think you’d like them.’

I take a sip. Sparkling white wine and water, ice cold. And another taste too within that, something bitter.

‘What’s the orange?’

‘Ah. A secret ingredient, known only to Venetians.’ He leans closer as if he’s confiding a great truth. ‘Aperol.’

We share a smile, just from the pleasure of being there, together. The sun throws shards from the marble surfaces around us, bouncing off the expanse of paving stones. I fumble in my bag, find my sunglasses and put them on.

You watch, then ask: ‘Are we on holiday?’

‘Yes, my love. We certainly are.’

You look out across the square. Small children totter there, reaching for pigeons. Older ones, closer to your age, chase them, sending them scattering into the air in a flurry of feathers, only to settle again a little further away. Here and there, hawkers sell snacks and ice creams and cold drinks. Distantly, their cries drift across: Panini! Gelati! Bibite! To the right, at the foot of the Campanile, tour groups cluster, waiting for guides who hold aloft flags or furled umbrellas.

You break in: ‘Can I go and play?’

I look at Matt, unsure.

‘Of course.’ He points. ‘Just stay in this big square, OK? Where we can see you.’

‘OK.’ You slip down from your chair and set off, a tiny figure running out into the vastness of the Piazza, as countless small children have done before you and will do in years to come.

‘She’ll be fine. No traffic.’ Matt reaches for my hand, there on the table, and covers it with his own. ‘Happy?’

I nod. ‘It’s amazing, Matt. I can’t believe it.’

‘It’s special, isn’t it?’ He looks grave. ‘I love this place. It’s either a miracle of faith or a miracle of engineering, depending on your point of view.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look at it. Look at what they built on a swamp. All this, here where we’re sitting, it’s resting on a bed of nails. Tree trunks, thousands of them, driven into the lagoon. That’s all that’s holding us up.’

I laugh. ‘Really?’

‘The Venetians are a pragmatic lot.’ He grins. ‘Smart and self-sufficient. They have a saying here: “Venetian first, Italian second.” They stick together. That’s how they’ve survived this long.’

A hawker skirts the café tables, showing off the tourist souvenirs crammed onto his cart. Postcards. Glossy brochures of Venice in half a dozen languages. A string of brightly coloured plastic masks with curved beaks and streaks of glitter down the cheeks. We watch him pass.

‘We should come next year,’ Matt said. ‘For the carnival. Carnivale. It’s all about masks. Disguise.’ He draws his fingers across his eyes, play-acting. ‘Here you can be anyone you like. Do anything you like.’

I raise my eyebrows. He leans forward and kisses me. His mouth is soft and the kiss makes my body ache for him. Tonight will be our first proper night together. The first time we share a bed like a normal couple. Fall asleep together and wake in the morning in each other’s arms.

He says in a low voice: ‘Thank you for saying yes – for agreeing to come.’

‘I’m the one to say thank you.’ I wave at the Piazza, at the drinks. ‘All this.’

He shrugs. ‘If we’re going to do it, might as well do it properly.’

Out on the square, you’ve befriended another child and the two of you run in wild circles in the sunshine, chasing each other, lacing an invisible thread back and forth through the crowd. Even from here, I feel your excitement, your sense of freedom.

I pause, wondering if it was the right time for an awkward question. I sip the spritzer.

‘You said you’d been before?’

He looks away into middle distance, slow to answer.

My stomach contracts. I can’t leave it there. ‘Holiday?’

Finally, he turns back to me, lifts my hand from the tabletop and encases it in his own. Here it comes. I have a sudden urge to lean back, to pull my hand away.

‘I came here several times but ages ago. A good friend at medical school, she was Venetian. Maria-Eletta. There aren’t many of them left, true Venetians. They’ve all moved out. She came from a very old family, been here for centuries. Very proud.’

He twists and makes a vague gesture back towards our hotel and the Grand Canal.

‘They have an amazing old house on the Grand Canal, further down than us. Been in the family for generations. All high ceilings and antiques and sweeping staircases. The bedrooms had tiny wrought-iron balconies over the water. We used to sit there for hours and drink coffee or these—’ he points at the drinks ‘—and just let the world slide by. You know what it’s like when you’re young. You think you’re immortal.’

I don’t answer. He seems lost in the memory of it. Of her.

‘The house had a particular smell. I don’t know if I can describe it.’ He hesitates. ‘Our hotel’s got it too. A sort of worn, fusty smell of age and salt-water and crumbling walls.’

I sit quietly, absorbing this, thinking of the old houses opposite our hotel with their decaying brickwork and imagining Maria-Eletta. A lover, presumably. A brilliant young doctor with the romantic soul of a true Venetian. I wonder again, for the hundredth time, why he’s bothering with me.

‘What happened to her?’

He pulls a face. ‘She came back. We lost touch.’

He lifts my hand to his lips and kisses the tips of my fingers, one by one. His lips are cold from the spritzer. ‘Anyway. Long time ago now.’

‘Amazing.’

He catches the tone of my voice and smiles. ‘Venice is amazing. She wasn’t.’

That evening, after we put you to bed, we order room service and sit late over dinner. Matt orders a bottle of our favourite, Valpolicella. My head thickens with the rich food and wine. We leave the shutters thrown open and cool salt air blows in from the water below. Neither of us speaks very much. I’m preoccupied, thinking of the night ahead. Perhaps he is too.

Later, we stand together at the open window, looking out at the Grand Canal. The buildings across the water gleam with falling light, chopped into stripes by half-closed shutters. The reflections dance on the choppy surface of the canal. The water beneath is black and deep.

The breeze reaches in to us, carrying the tinny strains of music and raucous voices. A few moments later, a tourist boat glides past. The deck is strung with coloured lights. People stand along the rail and some wave, giving a general drunken salute to Venice, as they pass.

Matt holds me in front of him, pressing my back and buttocks close against his chest, his stomach, his groin. His arms reach round my body and his hands, warm where the breeze is cooling me, touch my breasts. He trembles against me and bows his head. His lips kiss their way along my neck, my ear. His fingers unzip the back of my dress and pull it loose from my shoulders and it falls to my feet and pools there. He unclasps my bra, reaches round to cup my breasts.

He turns me to face him and puts my hand on his groin. The salt air chills our skin, exposed now to the night, and we press together, craving each other’s warmth. He slips off my pants and presses me against the open shutter. The panels clatter shut behind me.

He goes down on his knees and his lips move to my stomach and I stand leaning back against the smooth wood with one hand caressing his hair, the other on his shoulder. I have at once a glimpse back into the room behind him, now dense with shadow, and, if I shift my head only slightly, a view out into the night, straight down the open mouth of the Grand Canal, past the grand, ornate dome of Santa Maria della Salute and far beyond to the open Lagoon itself.

It’s a scene as rich and beautiful as a painting and I imprint it on my memory, even as my legs start to buckle under me and he reaches for me and guides me to the floor.

Across the canal, the double-doors to a broad balcony are flung open and, in a rush, a crowd spills out, loud with drinking.

I whisper: ‘They’ll see us.’

‘Let them,’ he says in my ear, and his voice is hoarse, and I realise I don’t care either; I’m flushed and free and already revived by Venice, this eternal city, finding again here my younger, undamaged self, reckless and joyful, the self I feared forever lost.

Later, when we are both heavy with tiredness, he lifts me onto the soft double bed and pulls the counterpane over us. He holds me close, warm against his chest, my head on the muscle of his arm, and lulls me to sleep.