The First of July by Elizabeth Speller Page A

reaction for distress. “I’m sorry. I’ve no sense of timing. Come on, Mr. Sydenham, let’s explore our newfound land.”
    The journey had been much easier, much more luxurious, than his outward journey from Liverpool. That time he had been driven forward by anger and hurt as well the fear and excitement of starting a new life. He had removed himself from what he believed was an intolerable situation; exchanged his family and friends for a few letters of introduction and that portion of the inheritance his mother had left him that he could get his hands on. Now he had that new life, a better one than he had ever dreamed of or deserved; yet a small part of him harbored misgivings as they journeyed east. In New York his decisions had been clear-cut; as they crossed the Atlantic they became more complicated, more blurred, more tinged with regret.
    Their stateroom was unreasonably large and strangely silent. Although he felt little sense of their occupying a cabin, there was, instead, the feeling of being slightly drunk in a country house. It was very quiet, but he was aware of an almost imperceptible tremor around him if he thought about it. He did think about it sometimes, at night, as Marina lay curled up against him, breathing evenly. Beneath them and the first-class warmth of their cabin lay fathoms of water, and his imagination traveled downward into the rocky abysses, getting colder and darker until, finally, all light was extinguished.
    His reasons for spending so little time in England were largely valid: he wanted them to have a real honeymoon, exploring new places, sharing experiences they would remember when they were old. He didn’t want to be her teacher, to show her; he wanted them to find things together. They had both traveled to the Continent before: she, briefly, to Paris, he on walking tours in Germany and Switzerland after he left school. Marina teased him sometimes that he was a romantic only thinly disguised as a rational man, as he planned not only the places they should see but, sometimes, the time of day at which they should be seen.
    “The Colosseum by moonlight is just a tradition,” he’d said. “Byron wrote about it. Shelley too.” But he even wondered himself why he needed it all to be perfect.
    “Fine models for marriage, both men,” she said.
    He shook his head at her in mock severity. “You’re talking about two of my country’s greatest poets. Do you hear me cavil about Longfellow? But in Venice, for instance, if we get up early we can feel we’re in Italy, not in some outlying territory of the United States. In Paris, we can buy our lunch in the markets. And in the matter of sunsets, you can never be too careful.”
    She had flung her arms around him and they had fallen back on the bed in their stateroom. She knelt over him, undressed herself, and this time controlled everything that followed. In this too, she was serious and determined.
    Two weeks later they arrived in Venice to cold and drizzle. Marina, her fur wrapped around her, was undeterred. That evening, the skies cleared and they had stood on the balcony of their hotel listening to the bells ring and the drift of voices over the canal. The concierge had lit a fire and they had dinner, almost naked, in their bedroom, she with a sky-blue swansdown wrap around her shoulders. She looked, he thought, like a painting of a wanton girl by Fragonard: the fine strands of hair framing her face, pale and dewy but for the pink fading on her cheeks, her soft mouth, her rose-pink nipples and the reddish gold of the triangle of hair between her legs.
    “You’re like a box of fondants,” he said. “Delicious.”
    She put down her fork and was about to make a facetious riposte, he thought, when suddenly and almost desperately he leaned forward and held her by the top of both arms.
    “Don’t ever stop loving me,” he said. “If one day you think I’m not the man you thought I was: in all the hurly-burly of our lives ahead,