Stone's Fall

by Iain Pears

  “And is this your son?” I asked, gesturing at an infant in the arms of a stocky peasant woman standing a few feet away. The child looked sick and was whimpering. The other woman—a nurse or nanny of some sort—rocked it gently in her arms and sang a crooning song in its ears.

  “Yes. That is Henry,” she said, scarcely giving him a glance. “He is very like his father.”

  The conversation faltered. I was pleased to see her, but had nothing to say. That easy talk which passes between men, or couples of long acquaintance, was not possible. Neither of us wanted to go on our way, but neither could think how to prolong the interview.

  “And you are seeing the sights?” she said eventually.

  “After a fashion, although I do believe I have been down this canal three times already. Or perhaps not; they all begin to look the same after a while.”

  She laughed lightly. “I can see you have not benefited from Mr. Longman’s expertise,” she said. “Otherwise you would know that that house on the corner,” she gestured behind me, and I turned to look at a nondescript pile that looked long deserted, “was once the home of the lady with the skull.”

  She smiled at me as I looked again. “Do you want to hear the story as he told it to me?”

  “By all means.”

  “I do not know when it happened,” she said. “Most stories in Venice have no date to them. But, a long time ago, a man was walking down an alley a short way from here. He was thinking of the woman he was about to marry, and his happy thoughts were disturbed by a beggar, asking for money. He was angry, and kicked the man for his insolence, and caught him on the head with his boot. The beggar rolled over into the canal, struck dead, and the young man ran off.

  “The wedding day came and eventually the bride and groom were alone in their bedchamber. There was knock on the door. The man, cursing, opened it and saw a horrible apparition. A corpse, flesh dropping from its bones. Eyes staring from their sockets. Teeth protruding where the flesh had been eaten away by fish.

  “The man screamed, as you might expect.

  “‘Who are you? What do you want?’ the man cried.

  “‘I am the beggar you killed. I want burial,’ the apparition replied.

  “Again the man ignored the request. He slammed the door, and bolted it. When he had recovered enough he went back upstairs to the bedchamber.

  “But when he walked in the room, he turned pale and fainted.

  “‘What is the matter, my love?’ cried the wife.

  “She got up, and began to walk towards him. But as she passed a mirror, she turned to look at herself.

  “Her face was white and skull-like, the hair torn out, the eyes staring from their sockets, the teeth protruding where the fish had eaten away the flesh.”

  She was talking ever more softly, and I found myself moving closer to her as she told this hideous, fascinating fairy story. When she ended, I was close enough to feel her breath on my face. She looked openly and frankly at me.

  “And the moral of the story is, never be unkind to beggars,” I said.

  “No,” she replied softly. “The moral is, do not marry a man who is cruel and heartless.”

  I came to myself and stepped back. What had just taken place? I did not know, but it was as though a charge of energy had surged through me; I was in a state of shock. Not the story, but the teller, and the manner of the telling.

  It was the way her eyes fixed on me that caused the true shock, so far beyond what was correct, and to which I responded. Or didn’t; I initiated it, perhaps. Perhaps she responded to me.

  “Now I feel dissatisfied to travel so ignorantly,” I said.

  “Perhaps you need a guide.”

  “Perhaps I do.”

  “You should ask my husband,” she said, and registered the disappointment in my face. “I’m sure he would allow me to show you the sights of the city.”

  Again those eyes.

  “Do I need to ask his permission?”

  “No,” she said with a touch of contempt in her voice.

  “I do not wish to trouble you. I’m sure you are very busy.”

  “I could spare you some time, I’m sure. I would enjoy it. My husband is always telling me I should do more out of the house. He knows there is little of my own here, not that he does anything except apologise.”

  I could not get the encounter out of my mind, then or later. It grew in me, like my feeling for the city itself, without me even noticing. But I was aware that what I saw and did was blending with my thoughts, almost to the point of not being able to tell one from the other. Although I wished to clear my head, I also wished the strange state to continue. It was luxurious to surrender to the least impulse, to allow any thought to pass through my head, to abandon that careful discipline I had steadily cultivated. To be other than myself, in fact.

  I needed company for distraction, but I also wished to discover more about Louise Cort. What was her history, her nature? Why had she talked to me in such a fashion? What sort of person was she?

  I had only met her on two occasions by this point, and only for a few minutes in all. Not enough to explain her place in my thoughts; certainly no other woman—and by then I had met many more charming, more beautiful, more notable in all respects—had such a rapid effect on me. For the most part I had forgotten them the moment they had passed from my sight.

  I found my way to the restaurant a few days later as I again needed company to fill my hours; the Marchesa was perfectly happy to provide food, at an extravagant extra cost, but her cook was dreadful and she insisted on dining in state in the old dining room. Just her and me, at opposite ends of a very long table. Conversation was difficult, to say the least, and the predominant sound was of clinking cutlery and the noise she made as she ate, for she had false teeth which did not fit very well and which needed to be sucked back into place after every bite.

  She would also, at least once every mealtime, get a dreamy look on her face, which I soon enough learned was the sign of a imminent visitation from the Other Side. On top of that there was no gas lighting; the only illumination after dusk came from candles, and the great multicoloured chandelier in my sitting room—though large enough to hold several dozen candles—had not, I thought, been lit since long before the extinction of the Serenissima. It was blackened with use, and covered with dust from disuse. It was dark and impossible to read after dinner.

  Strangely, the person I most looked forward to meeting again was Macintyre. I found him curious, and my interest was heightened by the desire to discover what, exactly, a Lancashire engineer was doing in a city so far away from any industry. So I engaged him in conversation, ignoring Cort and Drennan, who were the only other people there that evening.

  It was not easy, as conversation was a skill Macintyre had not mastered. Either he did not reply at all, or answered in monosyllables, and as he ate, he drank, which made his words difficult to understand. All my attempts to indicate an interest, to ask careful questions, met with grunts or noncommittal replies.

  Eventually I lost patience with him. “What are you doing in this city?” I asked, bluntly and quite rudely.

  Macintyre looked at me, and gave a faint smile. “That’s better,” he said. “If you want to know something, ask. Can’t stand these manners, skirting round things all the time.”

  “I didn’t wish to be rude.”

  “What’s rude about curiosity? About things or people? If you want to know something, ask. If I don’t want to say, I’ll tell you straight out. Why should I find that rude?”

  He pulled a pipe from his pocket, disregarding the fact that no one else had finished their meal, filled it swiftly and lit it, blowing thick clouds of pungent, choking smoke into the air like a steam train preparing for a long journey. Then he pushed his plate away and put both elbows on the table.

  “So how did you end up here?”

  “By chance. I work for hire, shipyards, mainly. I served my apprenticeship with Laird’s in Liverpool.”


  “Doing?”

  “Everything. Eventually I worked with a little group of people designing different sorts of propellers. By the time I left I was in charge of the entire design office.”

  He said this with pride, almost defiance. He must have been used to expressions of blank indifference from the sort of people he encountered in Venice, who considered designing a propeller as an accomplishment of no significance whatsoever.

  I wished to ask more. Laird’s was an impressive company; its ships set the standards for others to match. But he was already standing up. “That’s too long a story for tonight,” he said gruffly. “If you’re interested, I might tell you. Come to my workshop sometime, if you’ve a mind to hear it. But I must go and see to my daughter.”

  “I would like that very much,” I replied. “Perhaps I could take you for lunch.”

  “No restaurants where I work,” he said, but he was easier in his speech now; the roughness of resentment had eased off him. His final parting was almost civil.

  “Well, you are the privileged one,” Drennan drawled as we both stood to put on our coats after the meal. The days were still lovely, but the evening air was now getting steadily cooler. “What have you done to win his favour? No one has ever been allowed in that workshop of his.”

  “Maybe I just showed interest? Or perhaps I was just as rude as he, and he was drawn to a kindred spirit.”

  Drennan laughed, a pleasant laugh, easy and warm. “Maybe so.”

  Nor should I have been surprised by Macintyre’s workshop, when I arrived there the next day, somewhat late due to the difficulty of finding its location. The part of Venice where he had settled was not only unfashionable amongst the Venetians, I am prepared to wager that not one tourist in a thousand has ever ventured into it.

  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 seafaring 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 amongst 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 feet 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 ad
vantage 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.

  In these great halls of production there are marvels to behold. Go to the great ironworks of Sheffield and see the forges, or the new steel presses that have sprung up around Birmingham, see the gigantic monsters that can crush and bend many tons of metal in one swipe of a press, machines so vast that it would seem arrogant even to have dreamed of them. Or to the vast turbine halls that turn water into steam and then electricity in rooms so big clouds can form in their upper levels.

  And, in all of these, look at the men who work there. Are the floors clean, the men well dressed and proud of their appearance? Do they work with willingness, is there a sense of purpose in their eyes? Do the employers seek out the best, or the cheapest? Five minutes is enough to tell me if an enterprise will rise or fall, prosper or diminish. It is all in the eyes of labour.