How to be a Husband by Tim Dowling

The remaining nine days of our honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast stretch uncertainly before us.
    In the days when couples had tightly restricted access to each other before the wedding, a honeymoon made sense. If you’ve already spent two years living in a tiny flat together, the honeymoon does not coincide with the honeymoon period. Nine days seems like an awful lot of enforced togetherness, especially when you’ve just embarked upon a project that quietly terrifies you both.
    As a young married couple in a foreign country, you feel not just alone but positively quarantined, strolling through the unfamiliar streets of Positano together like two people who share a rare disease. It might well prove an instructive andreinvigorating break from the day-to-day drift of an established relationship, but ten days into a marriage is not a good time to discover you’ve run out of conversation. Under the circumstances, we do the only sensible thing: we run out of money instead.
    In hindsight we could have blamed a lack of preparation, but what really happened amounted to a failure of leadership. Whenever we’d been together in America I’d invariably made the arrangements. In London my wife had organized everything while I watched, agog, as if my life were happening in a museum.
    On neutral territory, however, neither of us takes charge. Nobody keeps proper count of the cash, tots up the receipts, or attempts to square our spending with the number of days left. The exchange rate is often discussed, but never quite mastered. Perhaps we both feel that the hard-nosed financial pragmatism a marriage requires shouldn’t start until after the honeymoon ends. As a team we prove to be both indecisive and extravagant, switching hotels on a whim, hiring boats without checking the price, and ordering expensive drinks on the beach. We had been gifted a tidy pile of cash as a reward for getting married, but it runs through our fingers without us even feeling it. This is before—right before—it was possible to put your bank card into a cash machine anywhere in the world and receive handfuls of the local money. In 1992 that sort of preposterous convenience is still a far-off dream. Even a bank wire transfer takes three days.
    Somehow, with two days to go, we wake up in a hotel on Capri with the equivalent of £30 in lira between us. It is notenough to pay the bill we’ve run up already. In fact it is only enough for one of us to take the boat back to Naples to beg some money from the only person we know there.
    â€œYou have to go,” I say to my wife, bravely. “He’s
your
vice-consul.”
    â€œI’ll be back,” she says. “Don’t eat anything.”
    So I sit in a room I cannot check out of because I cannot settle the bill, wondering if I’ll ever see my wife again. It occurs to me that Naples is not the sort of city to which one sends a woman alone on an errand. If anything happens to my wife I will have to live with the guilt. I have an urge to go after her, but then I remember I don’t have the money to cross the bay. I am paralyzed by worry, although my mind somehow finds the wherewithal to ask itself whether a dip in the pool might help.
    Finally, at sunset, my wife returns.
    â€œHe was very nice about it,” she says. “He gave me some money from the distressed seamen’s fund.”
    We pay our bill and return to the mainland in search of a room close to the bus station, so we can get to the airport first thing and put this whole honeymoon business behind us. The hotel we select is so cheap that it doesn’t even start until the second floor of the run-down building it occupies, and you need to put money in the lift to make it go up. It’s just the sort of place two distressed seamen might spend their last night in Naples.
    The front desk is a man in a hat sitting at a folding table on the landing. He also sells beer, fags, and soap. But the room has