He had rented a workshop in the boatyards around San Nicolo da Tolentino, a quarter in which all pretensions to elegance fade away to nothing. This is not the poorest part of the city, but it is one of the roughest. Many of the inhabitants, I am told, have never wandered even as far as San Marco, and live in their quarter as though it is a world of its own, entirely independent of the rest of humanity. I gather (though my own lack of skill prevented verification) that they even speak in a way which is distinctly different from their fellow citizens, and that the forces of law and order rarely penetrate, and then only with some trepidation.

Their business is boats; not the grand sea-faring vessels which were once the pride of Venice, and which were constructed on the other side of the city, but the vast numbers of small craft on which the entire lagoon depends. Need has produced whole species of boats and in a manner which would have satisfied Darwin: specialised to the point where they can do one thing, and one thing only, dependent absolutely on their conditions of existence for their survival, vulnerable to changes which can wipe out an entire class of construction. Some prosper, some fail; thus it is in life, in business and in Venetian shipping as well.

The galley has gone, vanquished by the sailing ship, just as the sailing ship is inevitably falling victim to the superiority of the steamer. Many have vanished even in my lifetime, but their names live on. The gondola, but also the gondolino, the fregatta, the felucca, the trabaccolo, the costanza, all of these still survive, but their days doubtless are numbered. Their passing will be a loss only to the aesthetic sense of those who do not have to operate them, for how much better is a steamer at nearly all things!

Macintyre worked and lived among the sounds and smells of timber and pitch, and was as alien in his operations as he was in his nature and nationality. For he was a man of iron and steel; in his domain the screech of metal replaced the softer sounds of wood being worked. Lathes had displaced saws, finely calibrated instrumentation had seen off the rule of thumb, calculation had vanquished the accumulated experience of the generations.

He was not waiting for me. He never waited for anyone. He always had something to do and used every moment to get on with it. I never knew a man so unable to be at rest. Even when forced to sit still, his fingers would drum on the table, his foot would tap on the floor, he would grimace and make odd noises. How anyone had ever consented to live with him was one of life's little mysteries.

And books? I do not believe he had read a single book except for a technical manual since he left school. He could see no point in them. Poetry and prose he found in the juxtaposition of metal, the flow of oil and the subtle interaction of carefully designed component parts. They were his art and his history, his religion, even.

When I arrived he was as still as he ever became, lost in a temporary reverie as he contemplated a large metal tube lying on the bench before him. It was about fifteen foot long, rounded at one end, with a host of smaller tubes coming from the rear which spoiled the neatness of the whole by disintegrating into a formless, tangled mass. At the end of all this was a metal stanchion to which was attached – even I could recognise it – a propeller of shiny brass, about a foot in diameter.

I didn't feel like disturbing him; he was so obviously at peace, almost a smile on his usually dour face. The years which normally showed through in frowns and lines had fallen away and he seemed boyish in complexion. He was a man who took delight in reducing complexity to order. In his mind the tangled mass of pipes and wires made sense, with each part having its allotted task and with no surplus or waste. It had its own elegance: not the learned, scholarly elegance of architecture, to be sure; this was stripped of the past. A new order, if you wish, justified only by itself and its purpose.

In that tangle of brass and steel, whatever it was, lay the reason for his contempt for Venice, for people like Cort. He felt he could do better. He did not feel the need to live in old buildings and worship dead artists, imitating and preserving. He felt he could surpass them all. This stumpy Lancastrian was a revolutionary in his way.

It disturbed me, for some reason. Perhaps an echo of my upbringing came back to me then, those many hours spent in church or being lectured by my father and others. Some of it sticks, it cannot fail. Man is justified by faith and submission. Macintyre would have none of it and was putting his disagreement into solid form. Man was justified by his ingenuity, and his machines only by whether they performed their allotted tasks.

Not that I thought or felt any of that; I was simply aware that I could not share his absorption, that I was an observer, aware of myself standing there, looking at the concentration of others. But even before I could pin that feeling down, he gave a sigh of contentment, turned and saw me.

Instantly the dour northerner returned to life, the joyful boy banished.

'You're late. Can't abide people being late. And what are you looking at?' he scowled. I could have taken offence at his lack of civility, but I had seen into him, glimpsed his secret. He could offend me no more. I liked him.

'I was admiring your – ah . . .' I gestured at the contraption on the worktable. '. . . Your plumbing.'

He peered at me intently. 'Plumbing, d'you call it, you scoundrel?'

'It is surely a means of heating water for a gentleman's bathroom,' I continued in an even tone.

It was so easy to reduce him to a state of apoplexy but it was unfair to do so. He turned bright red and spluttered incoherently, until he realised I was making fun of him. Then he calmed himself and smiled, but it was an effort.

'Tell me what it is then,' I continued. 'You will have to, because I can make neither head nor tail of it.'

'Maybe,' he said. 'Maybe I will.'

I could barely hear him. The noise in the workshop was considerable, and came from the three people who seemed to be his assistants. All, I could see from their dress, were Italians, all young, all of them concentrating hard on their tasks. Except for the girl, who was obviously his daughter. She was about eight, I would imagine, and was going to be the same shape in female form as her father. Broad of shoulder with a square face and strong jaw. Her fair, short hair was curly, and could have been an advantage had it been tended in any way at all, but as it was it resembled an overgrown bramble patch. She was dressed, also, in a way utterly unbecoming: a man's oversized sweater almost disguised the fact that she was a girl at all. But her face was open, her glance intelligent, and she seemed like a pleasant creature, although the frown as she concentrated on the job of producing some technical drawing in the corner took away most of the small prettiness she possessed.

Macintyre seemed to ignore her completely; it was only as our interview continued that I realised his glance stole away, every few minutes, to that corner of the room where she sat lost in concentration. This was the man's weakness, the only person he loved.

'Come and look around,' he said abruptly when he noticed me looking at her, and led me across the open space to where most of the machinery was installed.

I find it astonishing that any man can regard fine machinery without admiration. The machines our age has produced can induce an awe in me that is as powerful as the impulse to religion in other men. Again, perhaps this is a legacy from my upbringing, with a natural piety diverted and deformed into other channels. But I find I look on such things rather in the way a medieval peasant must have looked on the looming mass of a cathedral, stunned into reverence without comprehension.