‘After that my routine existence began to irk me. Venice called me. I could no longer pretend I was an invalid; I wanted to join the chattering, clattering throng that drifts through the streets of Venice as sluggishly as the tide flows through its canals. Supposing I did run into Antonio, what matter? And I wanted to see my friends, my friends from whom I had been separated by years of war and my own bad habit of not writing.
‘I owed each of them a letter, some more than one; their letters, like Antonio’s had come by devious routes; they had arrived months, sometimes years, after they were written, they were blacked out and smudged, they told me as little of the sender’s present state as if they had been messages from the grave. And I hadn’t answered, partly from inertia, partly from lack of opportunity, but chiefly from a deeper feeling that with the war friendship had come to an end. In those days I was internationally-minded, and it seemed to me that the breakdown of international relationships meant the breakdown of individual relationships too. Peace is indivisible, as somebody said. I had friends in many countries, some of them countries, like Italy, with which we were at war. I could not hate them because the State ordered me to; but neither could I like them as I had liked them. For me the war dried up the springs of liking; the intercourse between souls seemed an activity as meaningless and out-of-date as the other activities I had enjoyed.
‘I don’t believe I was alone in this, Arthur, I believe that for many people the steady warmth of personal relationships perished in the burning heat of September 1939. Certainly with me it did; I felt I had nothing to give out or to take in and this arid state continued, more or less, until the accident of my Venetian convalescence altered it. I won’t say it has never come back.’
‘So that is the explanation,’ I broke in. ‘We all thought——’
‘No, that was it,’ he said, firmly pushing aside what we had all thought. ‘I felt as though the currency restrictions had—well—made all forms of communication impossible. The blight of political hatred was on everything. I’m not sure that it’s gone yet. I believe people still say to themselves, ‘I will really start to feel—for you, or you, or you—and my feeling will be worth something to us both—as soon as, as soon as—the hydrogen bomb is perfected, or this business in Korea is settled. Then I shall feel for you, and perhaps you will feel for me; but until then our feelings are provisional—we are trying them out—they don’t involve us or commit us—they are on appro. We might make a deal in them on the hire-purchase system, but the day of settlement is infinitely remote. Meanwhile, nothing really counts.” ’
‘I don’t think I feel like that,’ I said.
‘Don’t be too sure. Anyhow, one dismal afternoon,—I’d had a nap—under a blanket and an eiderdown, the day was so abominably cold—I started out to see my friends.
‘I had no telephone and couldn’t forewarn them: I had no one to send, and as for writing letters, I had suddenly become too impatient to wait for the answers. The need for friendship had come on me like a hunger.
‘I decided I would call on three—the three who had meant the most to me. They lived a long way apart, one at San Severo, one—oh, but it doesn’t matter where, it’s impossible to describe where any place is in Venice. They were each under the protection of a local saint, though they were not exactly saints themselves. If you think of Venice as a flat fish swimming towards the mainland, one of my friends lived on its tail, another half-way up the north side of its body, and the third somewhere near its eye. They lived, as I said, a long way apart, and though they saw each other fairly often, they didn’t like each other very much. In those days when I went in for personal relationships—when in fact they were almost my religion—I didn’t like to see any two of these friends, still less the three of them, on one day, because they were so critical of each other. I suppose all that sounds rather priggish to you?’
‘No,’ I said primly. ‘I think it does you credit.’
He shot me a suspicious glance. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind now, of course. But in those days I didn’t like to hear one of my friends run down another, beyond a certain point, I mean, and despised myself for not taking the part of the absent one, or only taking it half-heartedly. Then, when I was with someone I was fond of, he or she was like a mirror to me: I don’t only mean that they reflected me myself, which was agreeable, but the other reflections seemed to me true, unflawed and perfect also: I saw the world in a frame—their frame—and I could live in it and accept it. My vision of them and theirs of me were one—or could become one, I believed, and that was what I aimed at: the merging into one focus of our reciprocal reflections—a sort of fusion. Well, each of my friends was quite willing to play this game with me and we had plenty of conversational material, unconnected with the others, to make our meetings fun. They were all cultivated people, who had spent most of their lives abroad; their outlook was at once cosmopolitan and parochial, and they had several languages at their command. They all had taste, too, in their houses. Though Lady Porteous’s house was by far the most beautiful, each of the three interiors had something that intimately satisfied and pleased me.
‘I did sometimes ask myself what I had to give them, that they should make me welcome, and supposed it was that, coming from London, I could feed them with gossip they might not have got otherwise. Like most expatriates, they were keenly interested in what went on at home. Lady Porteous and Denys Constantine were both great gossips; Miranda Collier wasn’t, she preferred to talk about a subject, but she too liked hearing the latest news. I had written a book or two, which gave me a certain status; and I have since thought that I took too much for granted the appreciation they showered on these callow works. I myself was so astonished at having produced them that I assumed too readily that others would share my wonderment—after all, writers are two a penny. Perhaps, being all people who might have written, but had not, they attached too much importance to the accident of literary creativeness. Come to that, their lives were a creation, for they made an art of living.
‘But it occurs to me now—I can see you’re going to laugh—that what I really had to offer was youth. Compared to them I was young. I was—but no matter how old I was. Their ages were carefully concealed, though always a matter for conjecture. (I rarely saw Denys Constantine without his telling me that Lady Porteous was nearer seventy than sixty.) Most of the colony were on the shady side of middle age, and they were glad to see someone who had the sun before him instead of at his back.
‘So it was as a young man that I started out on my sentimental journey that cold, wet, blustery day in June, and as a young man that I faced the prospect of the five-mile walk which I should have to accomplish if I was to carry out my programme. No gondola for me. Few gondoliers would have turned out on such a day. Antonio would have, but he wasn’t available.
‘I got to the Piazza in good order but then I stopped, for it was like a lake, a lake with islands and peninsulas made by the dips and rises in the pavement, which were imperceptible at normal times. On these a few daring pedestrians stood stranded. The arcade by Florian’s was above the flood-line, but so packed with people that one could hardly stir. In the distance, stretching across the façade of St. Mark’s, a flimsy wooden bridge had been put up, and across it two lines of people were moving in contrary directions—if moving be the word: no traffic jam was ever more complete. I looked round and as I did so a stranger smiled at me. After a moment’s hesitation I smiled back: he must, I thought, be some acquaintance from my Venetian past. Confusion spread over the man’s face and he began to explain: