Without looking at me my friend replaced the letter in his note-case and the note-case in his pocket; and for a moment hardly seemed to know where he was. He made one or two false starts and then said, ‘I asked Giuseppina who had brought the letter. She said she did not know; she had found it in the letter-box. She managed to suggest I had reproached her, both with knowing and not knowing; she was a past-master of reproach.

‘ “But can’t you think of anybody?” I said stupidly.

‘ “But signore, there are so many people in Venice!”

‘I got into an odd state of mind,’ my friend went on. ‘I didn’t lean out of the window any more: I didn’t even look out: if an atom bomb had fallen into the canal I shouldn’t have noticed. My sole occupation was trying to imagine who my correspondent could be, and why she had behaved as she had. That she was beautiful I took for granted: I never doubted it for a moment. Her beauty grew on me with every hour. She was blonde, sumptuous, voluptuous, Venetian, a Veronese figure. And why had she said we must not meet? My mind gave me a dozen answers to that question. She was of too high degree, she was of too low degree, she was ashamed of having made her feelings known to a stranger. For a time—for a few hours—for a few minutes—some one solution would satisfy me; then its plausibility would evaporate, and I would discard it and adopt another.

‘Need I say that I had fallen in love with her? Perhaps I must, for you know me well enough to know that I had never been in love with anyone before. How different friendship is—a matter of adjustments, of balancing this with that, of alternating self-assertion and self-sacrifice—but all conducted under the rules—the more or less reasonable rules—of affection. Friendship fits into one’s conception of life; with me, before the war, it was my conception of life—it was the pattern of my picture. It had no rivals: I did not care about money, or position, or even present or posthumous fame, so long as I could feel about me the fabric of friendship protecting me equally against the heat and cold of life, its dangers, boredoms, even its sorrows, protecting me, some people would say—I suppose you would say—against life itself.

‘Whereas love! Do you think life can contain love, Arthur? Come to terms with it, I mean? I don’t, I think the two are deadly enemies. But I needn’t tell you, no doubt you know better than I do, what love does. I don’t mean love that has declined into friendship,’ he went on scornfully, ‘but the love that is a virus, a fever, an attack. Love keeps out friendship; it is a parasite, and drains life of its juices. Love keeps out friendship, or if friendship is there first, it ousts it like a cuckoo; how often has one seen it happen! And friendship, with any luck, keeps out love. But I was friendless, I had renounced friendship; and then, when I would have taken it back, friendship had renounced me. My heart was swept and garnished, and destitute of defenders: that was how love got in.

‘But I didn’t feel that way at the time. I don’t mean that I didn’t feel tormented, for I did. But the torment was part of the growing together, the fusion of all my faculties which I had so carefully kept separate, to meet, as far as I could, the diverse demands of life. Only so, I thought, could old age be made tolerable—by cultivating one’s responses to the variety of life. Since the war I had neglected this exercise; I had felt the arteries of my mind harden, and been glad of it. For what was the use of trying to keep oneself up to a certain level of—what shall I say? general civilization, when the very people who were most vociferous in defending it were the first to abandon it—had to be, for, if not actually fighting, on them fell all the most decivilizing jobs—of waiting with empty minds and hands for something to happen, or of giving themselves up to some routine employment which an office-boy could have done as well. And feeding their minds with news—news, a quick mental pick-me-up, but how much food is there in it, I ask you, how many vitamins?

‘Well, I see you disagree with me but I don’t mind, not as I should have minded then. Then it was the only thing I minded, being disagreed with: and the less there was of me, the further I could contract into myself, the less there was to feel the pains of disagreement. I didn’t feel much, I thought I had ceased to feel at all.

‘But I hadn’t, and feeling being new to me I felt much more. My feelings were blissful, for I believed my love to be returned; I never doubted that, indeed my love sprang out of it. And never, even when I was most tormented by the thought that it was all no use, that nothing could come of it, that it was like a cheque for a fortune that lacked the drawer’s signature, I never felt any bitterness, none. Remorse and regret in plenty: for I told myself a hundred times a day that if only I had responded to her overture in the first place—before this dreadful second thought had taken hold of her mind—then all would have been well. We should have been together, we should have been whatever she wanted us to be; and—and my life would have had a meaning and a value that I never dreamed of for it. The belief that this meaning and this value were within my grasp gave me an exultation even while the thought of losing them tormented me. It didn’t make me resentful that, like other lovers before me, I was plagued by the question of ways and means. The difficulty was like a challenge to me. Now that I knew my signals from the window would not be answered, I tried to think of other methods of getting in touch with her. It didn’t occur to me, I’m afraid, to respect her prohibition: in fact the prohibition made me all the more eager: I assumed it was unreasonable, I regarded it simply as one more obstacle to be overcome.

‘I could not expect any more help from the windows; they were blind eyes that did not see, or if they saw I could not read their expression. For my purposes the many-windowed façade of the palace, ranged around its deep, dividing chasm, might have been a blank wall, and as at a blank wall I looked at it, when I did look at it.

‘I was up against a blank wall: how could I penetrate it? Suddenly it occurred to me, and I cursed myself for not thinking of it before, that the palace had a door as well as windows, a door through which, at one time or another, each of its occupants must go in and out. The door must be on the other side; it must open on the Zattere.

‘I can never remember how well you know Venice, Arthur, but the Zattere is a mile-long promenade, with bridges and cafés and all the rest of it, that stretches from the Dogana to the south-west corner of Venice. It faces a great curved sheet of water as wide as the Thames at London Bridge. It gets all the sun there is, and all the moon there is, and all the air there is, and is thronged with people at all hours of the day and most hours of the night. Besides those who are going somewhere on business, there are always crowds of loungers, the licensed loiterers of all Italian towns: and these I joined. I took my stand opposite the great door, and when I was tired of standing there were stone benches to sit on, and round bollards, sturdy mushrooms of stone polished to a honey-coloured smoothness, which were not so comfortable, being convex, but had the advantage that on them one could swivel round in any direction. There I sat, sometimes literally for hours, watching the door as, at very irregular intervals, it opened and shut. Of those who came out I got a full front view; how unaware they seemed of being watched! Those who went in I could not see so well, because, having rung, they turned their backs on me and waited for the electric latch to buzz (I could sometimes hear it) and set the door ajar; then they pushed it and went in. But these I had longer to study, I could learn something of them by the way they waited, impatiently or patiently. And sometimes, as a change from sitting or standing, I would go up to the door myself, casually, as though struck by a sudden whim, and when someone opened it I would peep inside at the immense, murky entrata, with its cross-beams, its marbled stucco flaking from the walls, its solemn doorways crowned by architraves, and, far in the distance, the glimmer of light through the iron grille that opened on the garden and the fountain. To the right was the archway of the great staircase, the main artery of the palace; people went up it and came down it, and I marvelled at their unconcern.