Perhaps this ambiguity did not make it the best spot to propose marriage. Too late for doubt, though; the engagement ring was packed, concealed in the finger of a glove, the restaurant table booked. We had spent a light-hearted morning on the cemetery island of San Michele, Connie posing in her overcoat and taking photographs of tombs, then marching arm in arm from Cannaregio to Dorsoduro, ducking into under-lit churches and gloomy courtyards along the way, and all the time I wondered: should I kneel when I ask her? Would that be amusing or embarrassing for us both? Would she prefer a simple ‘Will you marry me?’ The formal, period-drama feel of ‘Would you give me the honour of becoming my wife?’ The laid-back ‘Hey, let’s get married!’? We returned to the hotel, dressed up and strode out and had a wonderful dinner of tuna carpaccio and grilled fish, my hand travelling intermittently to the ring — antique silver, single diamond — in my suit jacket. ‘Indigestion?’ asked Connie. ‘Heartburn,’ I replied. There was beautiful
Think how romantic it would have been if she’d said yes. Instead she laughed, swore, frowned, bit her lip, hugged me, swore, kissed me, laughed and swore and said ‘Can I think about it?’ Which was reasonable enough, I suppose. Few decisions are more life-altering. Even so, I couldn’t help wondering why it had come as such a surprise. Love led to marriage, and weren’t we in love?
Thankfully the ‘Yes’ did come, though not until some months later. So while the question was ‘popped’ in the moonlight by the Grand Canal, it was answered at the delicatessen counter of the Sainsbury’s on Kilburn High Road. Perhaps it was my choice of olives that swung it. Either way, there was much jubilation and relief over the cured meats and cheeses, and a tearful and emotional check-out.
Perhaps I should have taken Connie back there, to Kilburn Sainsbury’s. I’m sure we could have made it that far at least.
But I am leaping backwards and forwards simultaneously. I’m still in Germany where, after watching my wife walk away, I scrambled into a taxi, returned to Munich and the scrappy chaos of the Hauptbahnhof, dabbing at the touchscreen of a ticket machine and hurling myself onto the late-morning train across the Alps to Venice via Innsbruck, changing at Verona, with just a shoulder-bag and passport, quite the Jason Bourne.
The train compartment, too, was of the kind favoured by spies and assassins and that journey only got more exciting as the train left the suburbs, crossed a wide green plain towards the mountains then suddenly, within the space of a few hundred metres it seemed, we were in the Alps. As someone born and raised in Ipswich, I have never been complacent about mountains, and I found the Alps extraordinary. Peaks like hounds’ incisors, vertigo-inducing plunges, the kind of landscape that might have been imagined by a deity or an ambitious CGI-effects supervisor. Good God, I murmured to myself and instinctively took a photograph on my phone, the kind of desultory, mediocre photograph that is never seen by anyone and serves no purpose, and I thought of my son, and how, had a falling meteor lopped the top off the highest peak, he would still not have raised his camera.
After Innsbruck, the terrain became even more spectacular. It was by no means a wilderness — there were supermarkets, factories, petrol stations — but even in high summer there seemed to be something lunatic about people living and working in such a terrain, never mind building a railway through it. The train skirted another escarpment, the valley falling away beneath us to meadows of the same lime green as the model railway landscapes I’d built too far into my teens. I thought of Connie, of how she would be getting home soon, saying hello to Mr Jones, opening mail, throwing wide the windows to renew the air, breaking the seal on the empty, stale fridge, loading the washing machine, and I thought of how much I wished she could see all of this.
But awe is a hard emotion to sustain for hours on end and soon it all became rather boring. In the buffet, I ate a croissant with pastrami and mozzarella which, gastronomically speaking, covered all the bases. Back in my compartment I dozed, waking to find that Brenner had become Brennero. The church spires changed, the mountains softened into hills, pines gave way to endless vineyards. Germany and Austria were now far behind and I was in the Italian Alps and, before too long, in Verona.
