I should also mention that I was married by that stage. My wife was good and kind. We did not love each other and we never had, but she did her duty, and I mine, and I held firmly to the belief that this was all that was required. I can say that nothing I did harmed her, and so, were I to be strictly rational, I would say that my behaviour was un objectionable to all but the religious moralist. But I am aware that religious moralists can make a good case, and I accept that my behaviour fell short.
We married when I was twenty and she eighteen; she died six years later of pneumonia, shortly after my return from my travels. I cannot even remember why I chose her, except that I accepted that I should. My mother disapproved, although she did not say so. Perhaps she was offended that I married someone with a nature so very different from hers—quiet, docile, polite, dutiful, obedient. She would have approved very much more of Elizabeth, had they ever met. But then I thought Mary was everything a wife should be. So she was; she was not, alas, everything a woman could be. After only a short while I could find little to say to her, and found little in what she said interesting; but I did not expect anything else, and I do not believe I ever made her aware of this. I spent more time with my fellows, less at home. I lived two lives and treated my home as little more than a place to sleep. My wife accepted this and was not discontented.
She did not wish to accompany me when I decided to travel around Europe; the idea of leaving her home, or London, or England, filled her with dismay. She begged me not to go and, when she saw I was displeased, urged me to go on my own. And so, eventually I did, although my attempts to persuade her of the joys and pleasures we would have together were quite genuine. I do not believe she missed me in the slightest; her daily routine was slightly disrupted, to be sure, but my place in it was so small she easily adjusted. During the eight months I was away we corresponded once a fortnight, and neither of us said anything which was more than formal, considerate and polite. We got along perfectly well, and I considered myself happily married.
CHAPTER 2
I was not a very good tourist. Travelling alone I found wearisome, and when solitude is broken only by statue after statue, painting after painting, the joy of contemplating the great masterpieces of the human spirit begins to dissipate quite quickly. I was not one of those hermit-like creatures who needs no man besides Mr. Baedeker for company. Although I do not need to be surrounded by others in order to feel alive, I do need some conversation and distraction. Otherwise all becomes too much like study; pleasure becomes duty and—dare I say it—one church begins very rapidly to look pretty much like another. In this way I passed down one side of Italy, and back up the other again, travelling by train when I could, and by coach and horse when I had to. I enjoyed it, although my memories have little to do with the great walled cities or the many acres of canvas I viewed, noted and sketched in those few months. I cannot remember a single painting, although I do remember trying hard to be deeply impressed by them at the time.
Venice was different, not least because on my first day there I made the acquaintance of William Cort, whose sad life has intersected with mine, on and off, ever since. I came in from Florence on one of those wretched trains which arrive at somewhere close to dawn. I had had little sleep during the night but it was too late to go to bed, especially as I was wide awake by the time my trunk had been recovered, loaded onto a boat and taken off to the Hotel Europa, where I had booked a room. I should say that at this stage the city had made next to no impression on me, not least because the weather was (unusually for September) grey and drab. It had canals. Well and good; I had heard about those, and Birmingham has canals as well. But the sense of wonder and amazement which one is meant to feel did not come to me. All I wanted was somewhere to eat a little breakfast.
Venice is—or was then—decidedly short on such places. It was not long since the Austrian occupation had ended, and the city had finally become a part of the new Italy. Hope for a new dawn was in the air, no doubt, but the effects of more than half a century of occupation and neglect were manifest. It was a dull place, which had still not thrown off the simmering resentments of the past. Many had befriended the Austrians, and were shunned for it; others had become too close to revolutionaries, and had suffered for it. Society had been disrupted, many of the best had left, others had become impoverished. Trade had dwindled, the legendary riches of the past were mere memory. This was the place I had dutifully come to visit, thinking more of the images of Canaletto than of the present reality.
I wandered off in quite the wrong direction and passed by those few eating places I saw, too befuddled to make up my mind and enter. So I walked on, turning this way and that, but not a shop or coffee house or restaurant or taverna was there now to be seen. Few people, either. It seemed to be a ghost town.
Eventually I rounded a corner and came across a perplexing sight in a small but pretty enough square. By an old wooden door some twenty feet high, in an ancient, ivy-covered wall, I saw a young man, well dressed in a dark suit and with a hat in his hand. He was rhythmically and with some force bashing his head on the door, occasionally producing an almost musical staccato sound by slapping his hand on it as well. At the same time I heard an incantation that came from his lips:
“Damnit, damnit, damnit, damnit.”
An Englishman.
I stopped and looked at him from a distance, trying to figure out a reasonable explanation for his behaviour, rejecting the idea of an escaped lunatic as being both too easy and insufficiently interesting.
After a while, and when he reached some sort of internal resolution, simply resting his head on the door and sighing deeply, all passion spent, I ventured to speak.
“Are you all right? Can I be of any assistance?”
He looked round at me, his head still resting on the wood of the door.
“Are you a plumber?” he asked.
“No.”
“A bricklayer?”
“Alas.”
“Do you have any knowledge at all of carpentry, or stone masonry?”
“All subjects that have passed me by. To think that I wasted my time at school on Virgil, when I could have been preparing myself for a life of gainful labour.”
“You’re useless to me, then.” He sighed once more, turned round, then slid down the door to sit disconsolately on the ground. Then he glanced up.
“The builders haven’t shown up,” he said. “Again. We’re two months behind schedule, autumn’s come on and the roof ’s come off. They’re impossible. A nightmare. Time is a concept they simply do not understand.”
“This is your house?”
“Palazzo. And no, it’s not. I’m an architect. Of sorts. I’m supervising its restoration. I had a choice. This or building a prison in Sunderland. I thought this would be more fun. Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Have you ever felt suicidal?”
A chatty fellow, but I did wish he wasn’t sitting on the ground like that. I didn’t feel like joining him in the dirt, and it was awkward talking down onto the top of his head. He had fair, sandy hair which already showed signs of thinning on top. A small man, slightly built, but neat of movement and quite engaging in his manner, with a broad mouth and easy, open smile.
“How long have you been waiting?”
“About an hour. Don’t know why I bother. They’re not going to show up today. I might as well go home.”
“If you could tell me of somewhere to eat, I would be delighted to offer you breakfast, if that would help to ease the pain.”
He jumped up instantly and held out his hand. “My dear fellow, I take it all back about your being useless. Come along. William Cort by the way, that’s my name. Call me William. Call me Cort. Call me whatever you want.”
And he shot off, left down a dark alley, right at the end, across a small square, moving as fast as a ferret. I had barely time to introduce myself before he started talking again. “Trouble is, I’m stuck here until the place is finished, and at the rate we’re going, I might well die o
f old age before I see England again. I don’t reckon they had any idea what sort of condition the place was in when they bought it.”
“They?” I asked, panting a little in my effort to keep up.
“The Albemarles. You know? Albemarle and Crombie?”
I nodded. Had he asked I could have told him the magnitude of the bank’s capital, the names and connections of all the directors. It was not a serious challenger to houses like Rothschild or Barings, but it had a reputation as a good solid family bank of the old-fashioned variety. Entirely wrongly, as it turned out; it stopped in ’82, and the family was ruined.
“Bought this place without even looking at it and sent me off to do what was necessary. Lord only knows what they want it for, but the client is always right. My uncle wants to build their country house, y’see, so he couldn’t displease them and say it wasn’t a job for us. Besides, it was supposedly good for me. My first solo job. It’s enough to make me want to go into the Church.”
“I don’t recommend it,” I replied. “I think you need more patience than you have shown so far.”
“Probably. Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to die here. I know it.”
“So you are an incurable optimist as well as an architect. I suppose the two go together.”
He didn’t answer, but turned into a dank and unwelcoming doorway which I would never have guessed was some sort of public eating place. Inside there were just two tables, one bench to sit on, and no people at all.
“Elegant,” I commented.
He smiled. “And by far the best eating place around this quarter,” he said. “I take it you’ve not been here long?”
“A few hours.”
“Well, then, you will soon discover that the magnificence of the city conceals the utter degradation of the inhabitants. There are few restaurants, and those are poor and hideously expensive. The wine generally tastes like vinegar, the people are lazy and the accommodations horribly overpriced and uncomfortable. I long for a good piece of roast beef sometimes.”
“Venice seems to have won a place in your heart, then.”
He laughed. “It has. No, I mean it. I can complain about it for hours, list all its faults in relentless detail, grumble incessantly about every facet of life here. But, as you notice, I have come to love the place.”
“Why?”
“Ah, it is magic.” His eyes lit up with something of a twinkle. “That’s all I can say. I think it is probably something to do with the light. Which you have not yet witnessed, so there is no point in trying to persuade you. In a short while—tomorrow maybe, when the weather picks up, maybe this evening—you will see.”
“Maybe so. But in the meantime, I’d like some breakfast.”
“Ah, yes. I’ll see what I can do.” And he disappeared into a back room, from which there came, after a while, the sound of banging pots and shouting.
“All sorted,” he said cheerfully when he returned. “But they were quite reluctant to serve us. You have to plead with them. Luckily, I come here quite often, and so do the builders. When they show up.”
The thought put him into a mood of melancholy again.
“Do they often do this to you?” I asked.
“Oh, goodness, yes. I will have a meeting with the foreman one evening, he will look me in the eye and swear blind they will all be there at eight sharp the next morning. We will shake hands and that will be the last I see of any of them for a week. And when I complain the re action is generally astonishment that I should expect anyone to show up on St. Sylvia’s day, or the morning of a regatta, or something like that. You get used to it after a while.”
“You don’t seem very used to it this morning.”
“No. Today is special, not least because there is no roof on the place, and I have an engineer coming to advise on strengthening the walls. That sort of thing isn’t an area I know much about, I’m afraid. I can design buildings, but what exactly keeps them up is quite beyond me.”
The coffee and bread arrived, both equally grey and unappetising. I looked at them doubtfully. “Not one of the great culinary capitals, Venice,” Mr. Cort commented, dipping bread in cup with enthusiasm. “You can get decent food, but you have to look hard and pay high. They probably have fresh bread out there somewhere, but they don’t think highly enough of me yet to let me have any. They keep it for their own.”
He swallowed a lump of bread, then waved his hand. “Enough. What are you doing here? Passing through? Staying awhile?”
“I am without plans,” I said airily.
“I go hither and thither as I wish.”
“Lucky man.”
“For a while, anyway. I was thinking of staying here for a few weeks, at least. But I cannot say you are the best salesman for the city. Ten minutes of you and any reasonable man would pack his bags and head for the railway station.”
He laughed. “You will find we like to keep the place to ourselves.”
“We?”
“The ragbag of drifters, idlers and adventurers who wash up in this place. There are few foreigners in Venice, you will notice. The railway and the end of the occupation is beginning to change that, but as there are few places for visitors to stay when they get here, there is a limit to how many people will ever come.”
An interesting comment, which I placed in the back of my mind for the future. As I wandered the streets over the next few weeks, I realised that Cort was right. There was an immense market for decent accommodation of the sort that would shield the traveller from the beastliness of Venetian life. The French, I knew, were well ahead in this area, constructing gigantic palaces in the centre of cities which offer every luxury to travellers prepared to pay well to avoid any real contact with the place they were visiting. Fed by the railways, organised by Thomas Cook, any hotel placed at the end of a line in an appealing destination could hardly fail to prosper.
Even at that stage, I turned down in my mind the idea of involving myself with Mr. Cort in any commercial way. I learned early that liking someone, trusting someone and employing someone are three very different things. Mr. Cort was going to stay firmly in the first category. I have always had the tendency to pick people up from all manner of places; my fortune and my judgement are one and the same. Being agreeable and being of use are not necessarily incompatible, but they not identical either.
Cort was an amiable man, intelligent and amusing. Honest and decent, as well. But to give him any position of authority would have been foolish. He was too prone to despair, too easily discouraged. He could not even control a dozen or so recalcitrant workmen. He had some desire to be successful, but it did not burn so strongly in him that he was prepared to overcome his character to achieve it. He desired peace more; alas, he achieved little of either.
Nonetheless, we passed a pleasant half hour together, and I found his company charming. He was a good raconteur, and a mine of information about the city, so much so that I invited him to dinner that evening, an offer he accepted until he remembered that it was Wednesday.
“Wednesday?”
“Dottore Marangoni’s at home, in the café.”
“At home in a café?”
He laughed. “Venetians do not often entertain in their home. In six months I have scarcely passed the front door of a Venetian’s abode. When they do entertain, most do so in public. Tonight is Marangoni’s entertainment. Why not come? I will happily introduce you to my limited acquaintance, such as it is.”
I accepted, and Cort looked guiltily at his watch. “Goodness, I shall be late,” he said, jumping up from his seat. “Macintyre will be furious. Come and meet him. I expect you will hate each other on sight.”
He shouted a farewell through the door, jammed his hat on his head and headed off. I followed, saying, “Why should I not like him? Or he me? I consider myself quite amiable normally.”
“You are a human being,” Cort replied. “And thus to be detested. If you were made of steel, were you something that could be honed to perfection on
a mechanical lathe, were your movements capable of accurate measurement to one-thousandth of an inch, then Macintyre might approve of you. Otherwise, I’m afraid not. He hates all of humanity, except for his daughter, whom he built himself out of gunmetal and ball bearings.”
“Yet he is assisting you?”
“Simply because there is a problem to be solved. He offered; I would never have asked even though he is the only person I know of here who is qualified to assist. Oh, Lord. He’s there already.”
We had turned the corner into the little street which contained the palazzo’s entrance, and outside the heavy wooden doors which some forty-five minutes ago had been battered by Cort’s frustrated head stood a man with a ferocious scowl on his red face.
Certainly “friendly” was not a word that sprang to mind. He had immensely broad shoulders, so wide that he barely fitted into his suit; he stood with legs apart, heavily-booted feet planted like trees in the mud. Hands thrust deeply into his pockets. He stamped a foot in frustration, turned and battered on the door with his fist before he saw us. “Cort! Open this door! D’ye think I’ve no better things to do today?”
Cort sighed nervously as we approached. “Good of you to show up,” Macintyre continued acidly. “So kind of you to plan an amusement for me this morning. To fill my idle hours.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Cort muttered. “The workers didn’t show up again, you see.”
“And that has something to do with me?”