I agreed.

‘I suppose that’s what I had been wanting all along,’ he went on, ‘to share something, and I did, we did—when I say I, I mean we. It all boiled down to that. I suppose I could tell you, but do you want to hear? Isn’t there something rather putting off . . . unattractive . . . in the spectacle of somebody’s meaning so much to someone else? Isn’t it rather like watching a dog with a bone? You can tolerate it perhaps, but you can’t like it. Besides . . .’

‘Yes?’ I prompted him.

‘Well, I’ve never told anyone. I never meant to tell anyone. But when I’ve got as far as this, I might as well go on. But you will think badly of me. I’m sure you will. You think badly of me already.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Why do you keep imputing to me feelings I don’t have?’

He frowned at my smile. ‘Yes, but you will. Anyone would, and I couldn’t bear that. Because at the time it seemed . . . well, perfect is a weak word for it. We haven’t seen each other of late years, you and I, but you know enough of me and I’ve told you enough to know what small hopes I’ve ever had of obtaining perfection in my own experience. And it’s the same with me now—a confirmed mental habit is so much stronger than the exception that breaks it. When I look back on that time, it’s as if I was a plain-dweller—old and’—he looked at me and flushed—‘and well, decrepit, looking up at a snow-capped mountain which he can hardly believe that he once climbed.’

‘All the more credit to him for having climbed it once,’ I said. ‘He should be proud of that.’

My friend shook his head.

‘I told you of my fancy of the archway, didn’t I?’ he said, ‘and of the indeterminate springing greenness in between where there were no facts but just the raw material of facts, the inchoate substance of experience before it becomes one’s own, well, in her room it was always there—the symbol and the thing itself, you see what I mean? Afterwards she used to have it dismantled so that we could see each other across the canal; but when I came back she would have it rearranged so that there was no need of blinds, but they don’t go in for blinds in Venice—or shutters or anything to keep us to ourselves.’

‘So you didn’t leave Venice?’ I said. You stayed on?’

‘Yes, that was one of the facts,’ he said, ‘that at the time seemed so unimportant—I hardly remember how I arranged it. I had Antonio’s money, you see. But in her room, there were no facts beside ourselves, everything was beginning, and it began afresh each time I saw her—for her as well as me, I know that, because we said to each other everything we’d been wanting to say all our lives. She was much younger than I was, but that didn’t seem a fact, either. I don’t speak Italian well, but do you know I was never once at a loss for a word—and I said things that I couldn’t ever have said in English. I expect that was part of the enchantment: in another language I was another person.’

‘But isn’t all this rather lovely to look back on?’ I said. ‘It sounds as if it must be. So why——?’

‘Yes,’ he interrupted me, his brow clouding again, ‘it is, in a way because in memory I can go back, but only sometimes, only as just, now, when I feel a sympathy outside myself that helps me—it’s never come from a human being before—then I can remember what I want to remember, without the rest.

‘In July the weather got much hotter—we were quite light-headed sometimes—yet I never felt the heat oppressive, never an enemy. I don’t think I could have conceived the idea of an enemy in all that time.’

‘Was there one?’ I asked.

‘Well, yes there was, Adele, the maid. Perhaps I ought not to call her an enemy: she only acted according to her lights. But she was jealous of me, or she wouldn’t have done what she did, or not the way she did it. I couldn’t have told: those Italian peasant women are so secret: she seemed only to want our happiness. How much that depended on her contriving, I never knew: I took it all for granted; my unobserved entrances and exits, and the untroubled hours between. I think I was quite a favourite with the portinaia of the palace: she always greeted me with a smile. She may have guessed why I came so often: perhaps any Italian would have guessed. But there were so many people going to and fro in the entrata and on the staircases, I seldom saw the same face twice. But I never looked much. The moment I was inside the building one thought possessed me. You know how wonderful that can be, Arthur, it’s the only thing that matters, so long as it’s the right thought. Everything else is a kind of stationariness that one shares with chairs and tables, the sense of being a fixture, imprisoned in oneself, never to alter, never to escape from the mould in which one has been cast. But then I had the freedom of a myriad existences, every day a change, a new growth, a new flower, like the plants in the window. And it wasn’t egotism, for I have never felt less self-sufficient; indeed, I was so dependent on the thought of her that if it had been taken away I think I should have literally fallen over.’

‘What was she like?’ I asked. ‘You haven’t told me.’

My friend glanced at me and away again.

‘I couldn’t describe her, you know,’ he said, ‘feature by feature. She was Venice’s reward to me, but she wasn’t typically Venetian. Venetian women are golden and pink and brown and inclined to be plump when they are young: obvious beauties. They are out in the sun so much, they soak it up. Myself I never cared much for . . . for amplitude, or even for warm colours. I like the Alps, you know, with the snow coming down to the pine-forests. And a sailing ship, when you can see the spars and the rigging. Not all sail set, that’s too oncoming and voluminous for my taste. There’s a kind of opulence that’s rather vulgar, I think: well, she didn’t have it. Her colouring was Northern, though her hair was very dark, nearly black. She had a Gothic fragility and fineness, like a saint from Burgundy or Chartres that had somehow strayed into Venice, though of course there is Gothic in Venice. You remember what Vernon Lee said of Venice, that it was difficult to “isolate the enough”, because of all the claims on one’s attention. Well, it wasn’t so with her. I never felt, with her, that round the corner there might be someone like her. A greeny light filtered into her room, a forest light—just enough to throw a shadow. Too much light hurt her eyes. And yet the room never seemed dark, there was so much white in it. I thought of it as a grove of silver birches. The walls were nearly white, the furniture was white, the muslin on the dressing-table was white, the bed-cover was white, and she . . .’ he hesitated. ‘She was a little pale.’

‘And the white wand,’ I asked, ‘that you thought you saw tossed about among the green? Did you ever find out what that was? Was it an enchanter’s wand?’

He took a long breath and said with difficulty:

‘I think it may have been her arm. She was rather thin, you see.’

After a pause, I said:

‘I understand the need for secrecy, and I can understand how it gave . . . at least how it didn’t take away from the zest of the affair.’

An expression of distaste crossed my friend’s face but I did not regret what I had said. Most of the lovers I have known have thought there was something sacrosanct about their relationship and the word ‘affair’ was too common to describe it.

‘But,’ I went on, ‘didn’t you get tired of meeting always in the same room? And wasn’t it even a little risky? I mean, I don’t know Venice well, but I should have thought it offered quite a number of retreats for clandestine couples—all those arches, and doorways, and dark entries.’

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘it does. There are those places, and one seldom passes them, at night, without seeing a couple whispering in them. We often used to talk about Venice—of course she knew it much better than I did. And we went everywhere, you know, to—to the restaurants, and the churches and the islands. And we made expeditions to the mainland too, to Malcontenta and Maser and Asolo and Aquileia—all those places. We lingered a long time at the great gateway in the garden of Valsanzibio that looks towards Padua—the only place I know where the reality is equal to one’s memory and expectations of it. Wherever we went, she was the genius loci; she knew just what to look for and how to feel and what to say. Oh, she was a wonderful guide and there was no fear, going with her, that the churches or the picture galleries would be shut, or that it would be raining; she knew the right day and the right time to choose. I have travelled a lot, as you know, but I’ve never travelled with anyone as far as I did with her never so far afield, never so far from my own base, so to speak.’