‘My name,’ said the man. ‘Non importa—it doesn’t matter—but she will know me when she sees me.’

Quite what happened then I couldn’t make out. Apparently Antonio pushed the interloper into the gondolier’s room, locked the door on him, and went upstairs to consult Maria, whose bedroom had been moved next to Mrs. Carteret’s and who was sitting up more or less all night during her illness.

He explained the situation to Maria.

‘Ma è brutto, sporco, e tutto bagnato,’ he said. ‘He is ugly, dirty, and wet through.’

‘Non si può,’ agreed Maria. ‘She cannot. But if she gets to hear—and she hears everything—that someone has called to see her and been turned away, ill as she is, she may be very angry.’

The sound of coughing was heard from the next-door room.

‘She is awake,’ said Maria. ‘I will go in and see her—è il mio dovere—it is my duty, and say that this person has called.’

She knocked and went into the bedroom, a splendid state-bedroom, where lay under a magnificent four-poster, the ample, but slightly diminished by illness, form of Mrs. Carteret.

‘Cosa vuole?’ she said, with the irritability of a sick person, though she was very fond of Maria. ‘What do you want? I was just dropping off to sleep. I was thinking of the signore—not the bon Dieu,’ she corrected herself, shaking her head on the pillows, for the ‘signore’ was another name for God, ‘but Signor Giacomo, who has gone to Rome to be received by the Pope.’

Maria explained, as best she could, why she had butted in.

‘What is his name?’

‘He would not give it. He told Antonio you would know him when you saw him.’

‘Has he a letter of introduction?’ asked Mrs. Carteret, whose mind was going back to earlier, happier days.

‘No, signora, è proprio un lazzarone—a real layabout—and you wouldn’t want to see him.’

‘Have you seen him, Maria?’

‘No, signora, Antonio has locked him up in the gondoliers’ room.’

‘Tell him, Maria, whoever he is, that I can’t possibly receive him. I am much too ill.’

She turned her tired head on the ample pillows and closed her eyes. How unlike the Mrs. Carteret of former days, a travesty of her, a cartoonist’s caricature.

Maria brought her message, it seems, back to Antonio.

‘She cannot receive him,’ she said.

‘Well, of course not,’ said Antonio robustly. ‘But we had to ask her—he’s so touchy about these things, and he might have been an old boyfriend, chissà?—Who knows? And he might be a thief. Anyhow, he was in a bad way, and I gave him some dry clothes and locked him up. ‘I’ll let him out in the morning.’

Hardly had he said this when the door—actually there was no door, only curtains of consummate beauty that separated Mrs. Carteret’s apartment from the meaner sides of the house (Mr. Carteret had his quarters elsewhere) opened and the stranger, still ugly, still dirty, still dripping, stood before them, an apparition as startling to their thoughts as if they had not been thinking of him, and they turned to each other, dismayed.

‘I want to see the signora,’ he said.

Antonio was the first to recover himself.

‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘La signora is much too ill to see anyone. Go back to where you came from.’

And he took the stranger by the shoulders to push him out. That was his version of the story. Maria was too frightened to remember; but she thought that Antonio’s hand closed on something that recoiled, without giving way, and vanished behind the closed door of Mrs. Carteret’s bedroom.

What next? Presence of mind is a rare quality and Antonio and Maria had spent whatever they had. They leaned their ears against the door and this is what they heard.

‘Chizzè?’—the Venetian patois for ‘Who is it?’ The listeners were astonished, they had no idea that Mrs. Carteret knew the Venetian dialect, for though she knew many languages, they did not think that she knew theirs.

It was a deep voice, unlike hers; was she asking him, or he asking her?

The next sentence settled this. ‘Who are you? Have you a letter of introduction? I am ill, and I cannot receive anyone without that. My husband is away—he is being received by the Holy Father—and I cannot imagine why my domestici let you in. Please go away at once, before I have you turned out.’ Her voice, which had been unexpectedly strong, suddenly weakened, ‘Who are you, anyway?’

The two outside the door waited for an answer.

A voice in no accent that they knew replied, ‘I need no introduction, Signora. I am a common man, un uomo del popolo, a man of the people, but sooner or later I get to know everyone. In the end everyone has to receive me, and so must you.’

‘Must? I don’t understand that word—non conosco quella parola—I receive whom I want to receive, and I don’t want to receive you.’ Her voice grew fainter, but they heard her say ‘What is your name?’

They could not hear his answer because he whispered it, perhaps he bent down and whispered it, and a cry pierced the silence, too thin to be called a scream.

Hearing this, Antonio put his shoulder to the door which was unaccountably locked, and went in. The electric light had recovered from the storm and was painfully brilliant; there was no sign of the stranger, but Mrs. Carteret’s head had fallen back on the pillow. Was she asleep, or was she—?

They crossed themselves, and Maria closed her eyes. Leaving the bedside Maria noticed the dirty, wet footprints on the floor. ‘I’ll clean those up,’ she said. ‘La signora wouldn’t have liked them. Vadi giù,’ she added, ‘go down into the gondolier’s room and see if the man is still there.’

Key in hand and still looking frightened, Antonio went down to the room which had so often witnessed my post-lagoon ablutions. Coming back he said, ‘No, non c’è nessuno.’ ‘There is no-one.’

THE SILVER CLOCK

Nerina Willoughby (so named because her parents, now dead, had liked the flower) had inherited their large house, as was right and proper, for she was their only child. Perhaps on that account she had never married; and was used to being, if not the idol of two people, at least their main object, the centre of their thoughts, and although she had had more than one offer of marriage, she had refused them. She was now thirty-one. Better be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave, so ran the proverb; Nerina was good-looking, in a rather austere way, and well-off; her suitors were much younger than she, as perhaps Penelope’s suitors were. So far, no middle-aged or elderly prétendant had presented himself, and lacking this rather doubtful incentive to matrimony—for though she was sure she didn’t want to be a young man’s slave—she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be an old man’s darling. Her parents had doted on her, their ewe-lamb, much as a middle-aged husband might. But their devotion, in season and out of season, fretted her and demanded of her an obligation of gratitude to which she couldn’t always respond and which gave her a feeling of guilt.

Independence, independence! Independence from human ties which are often, as they say, a bind. Better be by oneself, if sometimes lonely, than attached to another human being, probably more selfish than oneself, whose every move of oncoming or withdrawal, and the emotional strain and re-adjustment they entailed, must be met by a corresponding reaction on her part.

And so Nerina, who was far from wanting in affection, in fact too sensitive to its demands and too little inclined to impose her own, took to dog-breeding.

With dogs you knew to some extent where you were. They had their tricks and their manners, as the doll’s dressmaker said; no dog was like another, each had to be studied; each had to be cherished; they gave what they had or withheld what they had; but they were, for Nerina, at any rate, objects of devotion on whom she could spend her care and affection without feeling that, sometime or other, they would try to get the upper hand of her. Difficult they often were; but they depended on her, as much as she on them; she never had to say (for at heart she was a disciplinarian) ‘I must give way to Rex’ (or whatever his name was) as so often women had to, with their husbands.