Eating With the Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

creature. And accompanied, thanks to the likes of Ashlee, by enough champagne to give a girl reflux all the way through immigration control.
    I pulled my bag full of party dresses into the silvery air outside the terminal and took a deep, long breath, feeling that Venetian oxygen attempting to replenish my oomph. I tried not to fixate on the phalanx of happy couples pushing past me, glowing with the joy of finding themselves there. Where were all the single people, I wondered? Was I the only solitary honeymooner in town? Why did everyone have to look so deliriously in love? These and other questions cluttered my addled mind as I pulled my bag, which chose that moment to develop one wonky wheel, to the water-taxi stand. What was I doing there? Why hadn’t I turned around in Rome and gone straight back home to sort out my life? How could I even consider checking into a romantic hotel without Tom? What was the matter with me?
    ‘Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?’
    Of course I can hear you, I felt like telling the water-taxi driver on the pier: your face is only two inches away from mine. The sinking sun was behind him and I couldn’t make out his features, but his voice sounded loud and slightly supernatural. I stepped back. ‘Hotel Gritti Palace,’ I instructed him. I would think more clearly when I got there perhaps. He led me to his pristinely kept wooden motorboat. It looked like something in which Grace Kelly would have been at home, posing in a white halter neck and head scarf, head back, eyes closed, mysterious smile tripping across her lips. A mysterious smile was beyond me just at that point, my lips remained un-tripped upon, but I stayed outside the cabin at the back of the boat, my head thrown back, just the same.
    The water-taxi driver didn’t speak again, just hurled my bag inside the cabin on his way to the bow, then pulled out into a shimmering sea-lane that seemed to stretch forever towards the outline of the magical city I had dreamed of for so long. All I could see was water and sky and the silhouettes of distant spires, blurry domes, swaying towers, precious gems strung along a chain of sterling islands.
    It was twilight, the sun was setting spectacularly and in front of my very eyes, my whole world suddenly haemorrhaged pinks and purples and a sparkling sort of silver — the exact hue of which I can still picture to this day if I just half close my eyes and smile a certain way. It was like being in fairyland. It took my breath away and, in the hole in my heart left gaping by my lack of husband, I felt a lurch of unexpected joy — at being alive, at being there in the city of my imaginings. It didn’t seem right, yet I could feel the glow of something unbelievably like optimism as we approached the back of the floating collection of enchanted islands, leaving the endless watery blue of the sea, the airport, the rest of Italy, the world, behind us.
    As we moved gently into a wide canal Venice sucked me into her bloodstream, took me to her heart. The ancient, crumbling walls of the city rose up on either side of me, crooked and leaning. The buildings had that look of an old woman’s baggy pantyhose, still trying to keep up appearances despite inevitable decline. Endearing was not enough of a word.
    Once I was there, in the middle of it, I was surprised though — and not unpleasantly — at the suburban nature of my ancient surroundings. Well, not so much suburban, I guess, as residential. I had seen pictures of the basilica, the campanile, the square, of course. Who hadn’t? But that particular canal, those particular buildings, that was where people lived; real, normal Venetian people. I could see their laundry. I was passing by their windows as they sat at their kitchen tables sipping coffee and doing crosswords. I was catching a glimpse of their everyday lives. I was marvelling at this in the awestruck way people do marvel at things when they arrive in Venice, when at one window an extremely fat man