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But it was the body of the fish, San Paolo and Santa Croce, that defeated me, the blind alleys and dog-legs and compass-defying switchbacks. My map was useless here, and finding myself alone in a cool, exquisite courtyard, my response was not ‘what grace, what beauty’ but ‘what a pointless waste of time’. After an hour of dispirited wandering, I struck south to the open promenade of the Zattere, the fish’s pelvic fin. On floating pontoons the tourists were eating gelati but I was behind schedule now, and in very low spirits by the time I approached La Salute, where I slumped on the marble steps near the spot where I had proposed to Connie on a winter’s night, twenty-two years ago. Now a young busker stood there, Albie’s age, singing an Oasis song, written before he was born, the words learnt phonetically and stripped of their consonants.

‘Un mayee, ure gonna be uh-un uh safe mee …’

I missed my wife and wondered how long she would remain so. I missed my son and despaired of ever finding him and bringing him home. I pressed the heels of my hands into the sockets of my eyes.

‘An afer awwww, ure my wunnerwaw.’

Then I picked up my backpack, caught the vaporetto back to the tip of the fish’s tail, did the same thing all over again, and then once more.

When I was a child, this is how I imagined married life to be.

The day after the wedding, you begin to walk hand in hand across this great wide plateau and in the distance ahead there are scattered obstacles, but there are also pleasures, little oases, if you like — the children that you will have and who will grow healthy, loving and strong, the grandchildren, Christmas mornings, holidays, financial security, success at work. Failures, too, but nothing that will kill you. So there are ups and downs, undulations on the plain, but for the most part you can see what’s coming up ahead and you walk towards it, the two of you hand in hand for thirty, forty, fifty years, until one of you slides over the edge and the other one follows soon after. Looking up from the viewpoint of a child, that was how marriage seemed.

Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can’t see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.

Six months after our wedding, my wife had an affair.

I’m not sure how much I can say about the affair, because I wasn’t there. Infidelity is much easier to discuss from the participants’ point of view. They have the looks and smiles and secret touches, the beating hearts, the thrill and the guilt. The betrayed know nothing of this, we’re just fulfilling our responsibilities in happy ignorance until we stroll into the plate glass.

Neither can I offer an intriguingly tangled web of hints, clues and gradual realisations. There were no mysterious phone calls, no mislaid credit-card slips for restaurants that I’d never been to, no detective work on my part at all. I found out because Connie told me, and had she not confessed I would not have found out. She told me without preamble on a Saturday morning, resting her head against the cupboard because she didn’t know what to do.

‘What to do?’ I said.

‘What to do next.’

‘About what?’

‘About Angus.’

‘Angus?’

‘Angus, my friend, the guy at work.’

Apparently there was a guy at work — he was always a ‘guy’, which irritated me — an artist who had recently exhibited at the gallery where she now worked full time. Working late, they had drunk a little wine and kissed, and she had thought about that kiss a lot, and so had this Angus, this guy, and the following week they had gone to a hotel.

‘A hotel? I don’t understand, you’re here every night, you’re always here! When did you—’

‘One afternoon. Two weeks ago. Christ, Douglas, have you really suspected nothing? Have you really not seen the change?’