two, three.’
‘Times?’ I asked, unnecessarily pidgin. ‘Open?’
She shrugged elaborately, and her gaze switched to the person who was behind me. But one of her colleagues stepped towards me. ‘Sports centre?’ she checked.
I shook my head, specified, ‘Swimming pool.’
The tip of a pink-painted fingernail landed on the glass and scratched circles of deliberation before skidding to the far south-west of the island of La Giudecca. ‘Here,’ she said, dubiously, then a little more decisively, ‘yes, here.’
‘There?’ Perilously close to the island marked inceneritore was a small extension of the furthest inhabited island.
Smiling, she reached for a phone and a phone book in which she re-enacted the ritual of the fingernail for some time and with increasing ferocity before she was satisfied. Then, having dialled, she had a brief conversation which sounded like a blazing row before she turned back to me with a slip of paper on which she had scribbled some days and times. Bashing the paper with the busy nail, she explained, ‘Open for the public.’
And so that was why, on my second day in Venice, I went out to Sacca Fisola, home to many of the workers. I travelled on a vaporetto away from the city into the wide Canale della Giudecca, the sludge-coloured water churned by a wind from the sea. When I reached the island and stepped from the wooden platform on to dry land, I bumped into a man who was running with a baby in a pushchair. Behind me, I heard the vaporetto perform a slow, aquatic equivalent of a skid, the ringing of the bollard by the rope lasso, the cheers of the crowd on deck in reply to his breathless thanks.
To cross the island, I took paths across patchy communal lawns and around blocks of flats which were concrete but comfortably low. In the shadows, children played ball, and above them, laundry flared on balconies. Every step of the way, I was scrutinised by cats; dozens of cats, marooned but content. I imagined a life for myself, there. On the far shore was a small, bridged swamp beyond which was a brick building. And that was how I came to spend half an hour swimming lengths in a brand new indoor glass-walled pool on the tip of an ancient, convoluted, and sinking city.
For four days, I never once looked at a painting and there was no one with me to know. Despite my aversion to sightseeing, though, I did read my guidebook from cover to cover, and, occasionally, I was enticed. I went to see the church which had a keel for a roof and loomed from Campo Francesco Morosini like a capsized ship; the work of ship-builders during a slack period. My only serious excursions were to the Basilica. Heeding the guidebook, I returned at various times of day to see the mosaic-encrusted ceilings and walls in differently-angled daylight. Mostly, they were lit by their own gold: that half a square mile of biblical scenes begun in the twelfth century and not completed until the nineteenth. I loved the thin but muscular angels, prophets, disciples and saints of the early scenes, with their cheekbone-sharpened scowls, ramrod spines and strappy sandals. By the fifteenth century, the Virgin Mary had developed jointed fingers and a slouch. The few nineteenth-century mosaics featured crowds of pastel-coloured characters who were swooning, reclining, or lunging with spears. As I paced the intricately patterned and unevenly worn floors, the only women who appeared in the scenes above me were the many Marys and a lone thirteenth-century Salome with a slinky, scarlet, furtrimmed dress, a suggestion of high heels and a pronounced wiggle to her hips.
I was inside another church when I realised what had happened to me. I was trawling the distant, dilapidated Cannaregio, looking through a pane of glass at something tiny and white that my guidebook told me was St Catherine’s foot. That was when I realised: if anyone from home pushed through the door and glanced over, they would almost certainly fail to see me. They would see somebody, an anonymous body, but not me, because I was so unlikely to be there, on my own, peering at a relic in the chilly gloom of an unexceptional church in a work-a-day area of Venice. I was invisible, I had disappeared.
The only traces of my disappeared days are in some of the thousands or millions of photos taken by my fellow tourists. In those photos, there are pieces of me – perhaps a turning shoulder, the toe of a shoe, a swing of my hair – and they are all over the world, making a worldwide splintered mosaic of my disappearance. There was something else that I realised: Venice had become mine, mine alone rather than the place where Philip and I had had our honeymoon. Never once, for me, was Venice missing Philip; never once did I miss him.
Pondering, yesterday, that first disappearance of mine, reminded me of George, his old photo. ‘I’ve found a photo,’ he told me, last week, ‘1942 written on the back. A close-up of me, but my sister’s beau is there: his arm, his shoulder, the side of his head. I was ten or eleven, and he used to take me fishing, bike-riding, exploring. I wonder, now, whether he did all that to impress her. He was the brother I never had; I worshipped him. I had two sisters, older, outgoing girls, marvellous. Then suddenly he never came to our house again. I don’t know which of them had the cause for complaint, or why. For years, I was desperate to see him again, hoped I’d bump into him. Never did. When I came across that photo, the other day, I wondered what became of him, and there was no one to ask.’
With some trepidation, I asked, ‘Your sisters?’
‘One’s dead – years ago – and the other, I’m afraid, can’t remember her own name. I hope to God that I don’t go the same way.’
I had first met George in the library, a couple of months ago, in the tiny photocopying room beyond the reference section. Taped to the back of the door was the handwritten puzzle, Do you have your original?, which made sense when I raised the lid and found a local history pamphlet. The cover illustration was an old photograph of what is now the town’s General Infirmary, but the title was The Workhouse.
‘Sorry.’ Someone had come into the doorway, was reaching with a liver-spotted hand for the pamphlet.
I looked back at the illustration, squinted at the familiar but shadowed landmark.
‘You didn’t know, did you, that the hospital was once the workhouse.’ This was a statement rather than a question, but surprised.
I smiled, amenable. ‘I didn’t, no.’
He was tweedy, tidy, balding, bespectacled; his accent was local, rural. ‘Oh, Gawd, yes,’ he winced, ‘I hated going there.’
‘Oh.’ Ah, a madman: the reference room’s resident madman.
‘With my job, I mean.’
I calculated: if he was in his sixties, he would have begun work between forty and fifty years ago. Was there still a workhouse in this town during the ‘forties or ‘fifties?
‘What was your job?’
‘Policeman.’
‘Oh.’ Instinctively, I focused on the room beyond him, on escape.
‘Well, detective.’
I had to admit, ‘You must have seen some things,’ and for a moment I was truly envious.
‘Yes,’ his tone echoed mine; but behind his square, goldrimmed lenses, the pale eyes had a reflective glaze. ‘I was never bored. Sounds odd, because I had some pretty awful jobs – I worked with a coroner for a while – but there was never a moment that I didn’t enjoy. And not many people can say that of their work.’ Folding his arms, he contemplated me. ‘And I liked the people: the villains, I mean. They had some stories to tell; when I think of the statements that I took …’ He shrugged.
‘Must have been hard work.’
‘Oh, no. my father – who was also a policeman, like his own father – said that the force was ideal for men who didn’t want to work. My reason for joining was the house: in those days, we were given a house.’
‘Oh.’ Not a bad reason.
‘But my father was right about the police force as the last refuge for mavericks.’
‘Really?’ I tried to hide my scepticism with a smile.
‘Oh,