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from young.
    Passing a trattoria on the fondamenta, where a waiter was already laying out the tables – securing paper cloths at the corners with steel clips against the wind – he imagined, as he steered her through the narrow gap, the waiter’s cynical black eyes following them and determined they would not go back there for lunch.
    The church was old, twelfth century the guidebook said. It quoted Ruskin and he took a certain pride in knowing who Ruskin was and why his opinion was worth hearing. ‘Ruskin praised it,’ he explained to her, ‘but then it was restored later on in the nineteenth century,’ and she gave a slight shudder as if to reassure him that she knew that such barbarous practices were to be deplored.
    But restoration or no they agreed it was undeniably beautiful – the old mellow brick church.
    Inside, they stood, slightly awed, together on the threshold of the ancient billowing floor. Before them, in the dim curve of the apse above the altar, there hovered an elongated figure.
    Set in an unadorned vista of scintillating gold, the young mother of God held up her palms in an attitude of naked supplication, as if, surprised by some interloper, she were protecting her modesty. Instinctively, he crossed himself, and genuflected, making the gesture of obeisance.
    â€˜You’re not Catholic!’ she exclaimed.
    He had never said – why should he? He no longer practised; but there was something exasperating in the way she had spoken.
    He felt intruded upon, and bundled away the feeling with an attempt at casualness. ‘Not now. But it sort of sticks.’
    His wife’s face, puckered in angry astonishment the day he had told her he was leaving, interposed itself between the vision of the blue-gowned Virgin in her gold-tasselled stole.
    â€˜Oh no,’ she said, ‘I like it that you are,’ and he felt annoyed with himself for feeling grateful. The marriage vows were for life – his wife had sent fat, voluble Father Michael to remind him.
    â€˜It is a mortal sin you are committing, Joseph, to leave your lawful married wife, now. One that the Holy Father in His blessedness, mind, can never forgive.’
    A bleak ember of anger began to smoulder again, threatening to break into that consuming flame. She came across and put her arm in his. ‘You can show me, then,’ she suggested, ‘all the churchy bits I don’t understand.’
    But most of the church was a puzzle to him too, hardly like the churches he knew from home at all. Those were modern, with coloured paper flowers on the altar, and new pine, waxy and yellow. This one seemed a kind of emporium of pagan imports – on the worn marble floor peacocks picked at grain, a fox was unfathomably strung between two roosters; and the leaf-scrolled capitals crowning the grey-granite columns seemed to belong more in a pagan temple than a church. Only the slight young woman, in the background of soaring gold, with the still more golden halo round her chaste head, was familiar to him.
    â€˜I expect they took half this stuff over from earlier times,’ she said, comfortingly. ‘Anyway, it’s all worship, isn’t it?’
    They stood before a bank of glimmering candles, the long youthful Virgin above them. From the guidebook he read aloud,
‘The relics of St Donato are in the church; also, the relics of the dragon he killed may be seen behind the high altar
.’
    â€˜There!’ she pointed. Four lanky ribs hung incongruously suspended beneath the Virgin, who rested lightly, on one foot, on her cushion above. ‘See, the dragon!’
    â€˜It must be a bull or an ox or something, I suppose,’ he mused.
    â€˜No, it’s a dragon. It says so.’ She was prettily defiant.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said, prepared to be amused, ‘of
course
it is a dragon.’
    â€˜You don’t believe it?’
    â€˜Well …’ he was at a loss, not knowing