She did not wish to accompany me when I decided to travel around Europe; the idea of leaving her home, or London, or England, filled her with dismay. She begged me not to go and, when she saw I was displeased, urged me to go on my own. And so, eventually I did, although my attempts to persuade her of the joys and pleasures we would have together were quite genuine. I do not believe she missed me in the slightest; her daily routine was slightly disrupted, to be sure, but my place in it was so small she easily adjusted. During the eight months I was away we corresponded once a fortnight, and neither of us said anything which was more than formal, considerate and polite. We got along perfectly well, and I considered myself happily married.
I was not a very good tourist. Travelling alone I found wearisome, and when solitude is broken only by statue after statue, painting after painting, the joy of contemplating the great masterpieces of the human spirit begins to dissipate quite quickly. I was not one of those hermit-like creatures who needs no man besides Mr Baedeker for company. Although I do not need to be surrounded by others in order to feel alive, I do need some conversation and distraction. Otherwise all becomes too much like study; pleasure becomes duty and – dare I say it – one church begins very rapidly to look pretty much like another. In this way I passed down one side of Italy, and back up the other again, travelling by train when I could, and by coach and horse when I had to. I enjoyed it, although my memories have little to do with the great walled cities or the many acres of canvas I viewed, noted and sketched in those few months. I cannot remember a single painting, although I do remember trying hard to be deeply impressed by them at the time.
Venice was different, not least because on my first day there I made the acquaintance of William Cort, whose sad life has intersected with mine, on and off, ever since. I came in from Florence on one of those wretched trains which arrive at somewhere close to dawn. I had had little sleep during the night but it was too late to go to bed, especially as I was wide awake by the time my trunk had been recovered, loaded onto a boat and taken off to the Hotel Europa, where I had booked a room. I should say that at this stage the city had made next to no impression on me, not least because the weather was (unusually for September) grey and drab. It had canals. Well and good; I had heard about those, and Birmingham has canals as well. But the sense of wonder and amazement which one is meant to feel did not come to me. All I wanted was somewhere to eat a little breakfast.
Venice is – or was then – decidedly short on such places. It was not long since the Austrian occupation had ended, and the city had finally become a part of the new Italy. Hope for a new dawn was in the air, no doubt, but the effects of more than half a century of occupation and neglect were manifest. It was a dull place, which had still not thrown off the simmering resentments of the past. Many had befriended the Austrians, and were shunned for it; others had become too close to revolutionaries, and had suffered for it. Society had been disrupted, many of the best had left, others had become impoverished. Trade had dwindled, the legendary riches of the past were mere memory. This was the place I had dutifully come to visit, thinking more of the images of Canaletto than of the present reality.
I wandered off in quite the wrong direction and passed by those few eating places I saw, too befuddled to make up my mind and enter. So I walked on, turning this way and that, but not a shop or coffee house or restaurant or taverna was there now to be seen. Few people, either. It seemed to be a ghost town.
Eventually I rounded a corner and came across a perplexing sight in a small but pretty enough square. By an old wooden door some twenty feet high, in an ancient, ivy-covered wall, I saw a young man, well dressed in a dark suit and with a hat in his hand. He was rhythmically and with some force bashing his head on the door, occasionally producing an almost musical staccato sound by slapping his hand on it as well. At the same time I heard an incantation that came from his lips:
'Damnit, damnit, damnit, damnit.'
An Englishman.
I stopped and looked at him from a distance, trying to figure out a reasonable explanation for his behaviour, rejecting the idea of an escaped lunatic as being both too easy and insufficiently interesting.
After a while, and when he reached some sort of internal resolution, simply resting his head on the door and sighing deeply, all passion spent, I ventured to speak.
'Are you all right? Can I be of any assistance?'
He looked round at me, his head still resting on the wood of the door.
'Are you a plumber?' he asked.
'No.'
'A bricklayer?'
'Alas.'
'Do you have any knowledge at all of carpentry, or stone masonry?'
