by Janet Todd
His lowness enveloped everything. What had caused it? Doubt, she supposed. Doubt of himself. Could he ever do what he wanted, fulfil his purpose, embody his vision, do much more than write an inspired fragment?
This Vision, this thing apart, was hungry; it needed to be fed. It was taking from his substance, like an unborn child within a starving woman.
She was not even trying to feed it from outside, even had she the right sustenance.
Once devastated by imperial wars, the villages were now recovering, seeking a living in the old way: by fleecing travellers.
‘It would not have been so under Napoleon,’ said Robert James.
They were eating stale oily food in an inn close to where the land began to rise steeply. In the distance were outlines of mountains, at intervals indistinguishable from clouds.
It was old talk. In the past she wouldn’t have contradicted, but the context had changed. She was weary of agreeing or being silent, tired of the tension of another’s mood, tired of her own contingency. ‘I thought Napoleon betrayed the Revolution,’ she said.
‘Glib, glib. You are wrong. Energy is always to be welcomed.’
‘The Revolution was energetic. It ended in massacre, in Terror. Look now, nothing is altered.’
He was impatient, his hands grabbing and pulling strands of his residual hair. ‘The ideas are separate from the people who mauled them. The upheaval occurred on shaky foundations. Napoleon took the moment and made it great. Even you might see that. He was wrong-headed, he was a man of action but a genius, the rest were little men.’
He wanted to lapse into silence, as she well knew. She wouldn’t let him. She niggled at him, a lurcher worrying a bone.
‘But they believed in equality. He didn’t.’
‘That sort of equality, pulling down the exceptional, the great, produced the guillotine. If the people had risen up on behalf of truth and greatness, it would have been different. They didn’t. It was for envy and bread. But, still, they acted; that’s more than you have done. The English are puny. It’s the legacy of Protestantism, it brings down everything majestic and beautiful. You, they, abuse language.’
‘You are still a Catholic,’ she mocked.
‘It has nothing to do with being Catholic. Didn’t I create Attila, the scourge of Catholics, routed by their nauseous cant? I speak of the moral relationship to language, the universal. I have told you often enough.’
Often indeed.
She was too weary to go on. However he protested, it was all Roman, all magic, all preposterous, all achingly grand.
After eating, Robert went outside. She saw him sitting on a stone bench, a breeze blowing over a face gone slack. She went over to him and clasped his limp hand.
Could they not be quiet bodies? He was too tired to respond or pull his hand away.
Was he ill? Or disturbed, a little mad? What did that make her?
At the Hôtel de Genève in Poligny he turned on her, using force conserved in long silences. ‘Go away, go away,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be with you.’
Could it be clearer than that? If there’d ever been love, surely it was dead now. And yet . . .
She could not be without Robert James.
It would be to lose her essence: Caroline without her Gilbert. If she would avoid this horror, she must adapt to another’s richer existence. That was what love was, wasn’t it? She was Mrs Robert James, even without his or society’s permission.
All that nearly repulsed her still tugged at her heart whenever there was a chance she might lose him: the balding head on the muscular body seemed disarming weakness grafted on strength; the short legs a manly refusal of the sportsman’s effeminacy; the pale eyes telling of a creative spirit that looked through not with. The inside was all-important, the body a shell covering wonders.
What sort of object of desire was this and what was it to do with her?
Comforting comfortable ordinary Sarah could have helped perhaps in this dilemma, had she allowed her. But she’d not let her cousin try, or try hard enough.
She’d overheard her friend Mrs Lymington say something when they all met once at Sarah’s house for a child’s birthday celebration. Mrs Lymington had said, ‘He would not last long with me,’ and tittered. She’d strained her ears to hear Sarah’s reply but failed. Jane Lymington couldn’t know Robert, so she was responding to what Sarah said of him.
Could simple cousin Sarah be wiser than she was? She’d said as much. Ann assumed she spoke in jest.
Once when Sarah had sat with a plump twin on her knee, pulling at her hair and pushing against her swollen belly, Ann tried to tell her cousin something of what was happening. She approached the topic warily. She eschewed the word ‘horror’ and came nowhere near explaining the abject state she was often rebelliously in during those last weeks in London.
Sarah had laughed, then smiled, ‘Surely as the writer of tales with mouldering castles and clanking chains you’ll know what to do with a little real-life difficulty.’
Now, so far away, over so much water and so many dirt miles, she understood Sarah’s delicacy. How kind to stop her confessing what must in memory give pain.
They ascended the mountains, following the road through deep valleys, by rocks and craggy summits. When she pointed out the sublimity of the lofty heights and slopes with firs and torrents, a sublimity worthy of Mrs Radcliffe at her soaring best, Robert was dismissive.
The mountains were a tomb, he said.
Even she knew sublimity was better in The Mysteries of Udolpho than through the window of a jolting carriage. But still there was this tremendous thing, just outside.
It was not Robert’s tremendous thing.
‘Do you want to visit Voltaire’s house at Ferney?’ she’d ventured near Geneva.
‘No, I will not pay that compression of vanity such a compliment.’
What had caught Robert’s attention was the hydraulic machine powering the city fountains.
She remembered how he’d admired the gas lights and mirror curtain in London while scorning the plays; he’d been enthralled by Leonardo’s mechanical lion. Could more of such marvels have taken him out of his lethargy, even out of his treacherous poetic self? Could he have been amused quite simply, with toys? Like a child.
Then a hitch. The passports had not been signed by the Austrian Minister at Paris or indeed the French Minister of the Interior; Robert had left them in the offices and picked them up later, but hadn’t checked they’d been signed. He was impatient; it was not his fault. No one had queried them as they passed along through city gates. Why now?
More expense, for a messenger must ride to the sub-prefect of the district to get permission. It arrived after long delay with a warning that the pass was only partial: there would be constant harassing on the rest of the way out of France and into Italy.
Snow, white and green ice, porphyry rocks, grottoes and archways of granite failed to move him beyond the remark that it was all earth unmade. Only the signs of Napoleon roused him: the greatness of the vision that had caused these rocks to be blown sky high with gunpowder. Engineers had done the deed but they answered the will of one man who had the intellect to understand and conquer the virgin snow and ice. He ordered the explosions.
For the last stage in the mountains they took the early-morning charabanc shared with several passengers, mainly Germans. It was still expensive even then for there had to be guides, mules, riders, all needing to be paid, six livres here, nine there, divided out, but still.
Down and down they went, paying to have their trunks ransacked by guards at every stop, down through gorges into where vines were curiously trained from tree to tree. Robert continued gloomy. She felt little better, her female problems troubling her. It wasn’t just strength that men had over women.
Italy at last – and the most rapacious customs men.
They had to stop longer than they wished in Milan to get their papers in order. Even she lacked much energy for sightseeing but out o
f habit she suggested the cathedral, open from sunrise to sunset according to the guidebook. He was uninterested. She proposed other churches, other palaces. He didn’t care for tasteless extravagance, not for art as duty.
‘I am sick of travelling, let’s just go to Venice, and finish the comedy.’
So they traipsed on through rice and grain fields and vineyards, through towns, some bustling, some deserted. She tried out the Italian learned from Signor Moretti and found that his Roman tongue was not currency here. Or perhaps he’d left so long ago he’d fallen behind the times. She couldn’t easily catch the lilt that might have made her words intelligible. Robert picked up language to speak, but made little effort to understand.
Might he warm to these more vital people? Not even their courtly manners, the gentle bows and kisses of the hand, animated him, although he was not displeased to be treated with more ceremony.
They stopped in a small town by the Brenta, delayed yet again by something not quite right in their papers. He’d found an Englishman, no, an Irishman – dear God, an Irishman – and he was drinking wine with him. The Irishman said there was an English colony in Venice. It was a dismal place of shifting foreigners. He’d left it for good.
She doubted it was dismal. It glittered spectacularly in Mrs Radcliffe’s novels. She tried to look forward to gliding down the Grand Canal to the shining sea even if she did it alone. Better if she did it alone.
The Irishman went on his way to Bologna. She’d caught sight of a picture of bare buttocks garishly tinted in pink and red, so assumed he dealt in unsavoury prints. He left Robert drunk and inflated with talk. When he got up he stumbled and fell on to her. She caught him, then fell herself.
‘See what you’ve made me do,’ he said.
What was the matter with her that she put up with this, resented it and got back on her hind legs to beg again? Was female independence so ludicrous, so unnatural as cousin Sarah thought, that she was clinging to its opposite as to life itself?
Could she fear being alone in a foreign land? Doubtful, for she’d negotiated most of the journey and could do it again.
Best not think too much.
Venice
11
They were on the sea in the dark for the final lap of the journey. A flickering lantern dangled and swayed from the prow of the boat. They were rowed past buildings: more like rocks untidy with undergrowth. They smelled of people, of human waste.
So this was it. Venice.
No one spoke. They entered a wide stretch of water. The Grand Canal?
The boatman glided to a dripping wooden post, then stopped. He leapt into the mist. The boat bobbed dangerously. He said something they didn’t hear. Robert trembled with irritation.
‘What damned thing is he about now?’ His face was turned to the bank.
The boatman came back with a girl muffled in a dark cloak. He dumped her on to the boat like a bundle of rags. ‘Sorella,’ he muttered and took up the oar. The bundle twined round his leg.
They were out on open water again. Where could they be going? Across the Adriatic in a flimsy open boat? To meet Barbary pirates, Turkish corsairs?
They were too poor for kidnapping. Perhaps they were being returned to the mainland, the trip a paid-for manoeuvre to collect a droopy sweetheart.
After a few minutes, more dark houses loomed, with light flickering from them. Oil lamps yellowing the edges of shuttered windows? The boat glided down another, narrower stretch of water.
By now her eyes were used to the dark but she could still see little, and the mist, though thinning, remained dense. The stench was strong, fishy, acrid, but less human. She tried but failed to close her nose. Some people could do that.
The boat – was this a gondola? She’d described their sleek glamour more than once but could this cramped shabby craft be one? – came softly to rest by stone steps. The water splashed over them trailing dark green fronds. She looked down. Only two large steps rose above the waterline, blackened by the green slime.
The boatman disentwined himself from the pile of girl’s clothes, and gestured for them to get out. He wasted no words.
‘Inglese,’ he’d said when they first boarded his craft, then spat. It surprised her. This easy hatred had been a French habit – explicable in France after Waterloo and its Emperor’s humiliation. What had the English done to Venice?
She recalled Fred Curran’s words: given Venice to the Austrians. Not England alone of course, but all the gangsters who carved up Europe after Napoleon’s fall.
Probably it had nothing at all to do with politics; it was rather that they were strangers and not rich enough to be fleeced.
The boatman was rapping on the narrow door of a tall house. He left Robert and Ann to get out of the unstable boat as best they could. The girl appeared to be asleep in the scrambled cloth.
Robert clambered over the rim before she could warn him, slipped on the slimy step and fell, dirtying the green greatcoat that had stayed unharmed through half of Europe.
Hitching up her skirts she bent down, intending to kneel on the cold step. Even then the moving fronds nearly edged her off. Her stockings were thin and wet against her pressure. She struggled to pull herself up. The water sloshed against the stone slabs and went over her shoes. A rat plopped into the canal.
By the time they both stood on the pavement they could hear footsteps in the house.
A heavy woman in late middle age came to the door, pulling back a rusty bolt that screeched, then thudded into place. By her flickering oil lamp she seemed even darker than the man in the boat. She said something in a harsh voice. This was not the language of Signor Moretti. A dialect, perhaps?
Signora Scorzeri looked at what the boatman had delivered. He picked up people, often foreigners, from Mestre on the mainland, and ferried them to her door – the last had been two giggling Frenchmen scarcely beyond twenty but with enough money to take her middle floor for the winter months, perhaps longer. She preferred foreigners: she could charge them more and they were less fussy about her cooking.
This couple was not prepossessing. Had they been dragged behind the boat? Yet there was something about the man. He bowed over her hand. She softened.
Then hardened. They’d arrived with no servant, not even a woman. Unusual for the English. What money could come from bedraggled people who kept no man or maid? A couple of trunks were being unloaded from the boat but there were no bandboxes, no parcels declaring the acquisitive traveller. What had such people to do here? Probably they were fleeing something.
She stared at them, narrowing her black pebbly eyes. She doubted they were married. They had a look about them.
Still, she would take them in – her top rooms had been empty these many months – and she signalled as much.
‘Names,’ she said in heavily accented English. ‘Give names.’
‘Signor and Signora James, Anna and Roberto James,’ said Ann.
‘Jamis,’ said the woman.
‘James,’ said Ann.
Anna and Roberto: they sounded operatic as Ann and Robert had once seemed romantic. Even as the falsehood was wearily repeated she liked to hear it.
The man bade no farewell to his passengers as he stepped back into the boat. Normally he informed the authorities of foreigners he ferried over from the mainland, but he doubted he’d bother in this case. The sorella woke at his footfall and twisted herself upright like a growing vine round his torso, her head swathed in dark scarves.
They followed the padrona up sloping steps of damp uneven stone, leaving a ragged boy scarcely in his teens to carry up the trunks. At length they entered a large, piercingly cold room with a high ceiling crossed by dark, crudely cut wooden beams.
She’d thought Italy would be warm. Another lie of poetry and novels, the warm south that wasn’t warm.
It was only November. It must get worse.
The woman had given up speaking Italian or, Ann supposed now, Venetian at them and simply gestured with a weary hand at
the three rooms.
The bed was immense. It smelled musty. She felt her chest constrict. Robert disliked her weakness and would be especially morose if she complained. By hawking and coughing in the morning she could rid herself of the effects.
A big bed had one use. She could hug the far edge, not to avoid Robert’s embraces – it was long since he’d offered those – but to get away from the loud snoring that shook his frame, increased, then ended in a start of wakefulness before the whole cycle began once more.
The soft blue silk scarf he’d bought her so long ago in London had during their long journey been folded into a cover for her ears. It slipped during the night and was no proof against the final crescendo when Robert lay sprawled on his back.
Tonight she was so tired she managed to fall into a dream-filled sleep even before she could put the blue scarf in place.
A few hours later both were awake and in the sitting room. Robert had opened the shutters on a silvery-grey, less misty morning. He was standing at the window letting in the colder air with its smell of seaweed and salt. The sound of water banging on stone and wood entered the room. It made it seem part of the wet workaday world. Robert responded. ‘Perhaps here I might do something.’
‘Of course,’ she said, trying to catch her breath. Her chest was still full of bad musty air.
He went into the small adjoining room which they both assumed he’d take for his writing. He came back: ‘But coffee, coffee.’
Coffee cost money. Each chocolate drunk, each tea and glass of wine delivered, each coffee taken stole from the bread and meat that were surely more essential. But she was not a demanding coffee drinker. He’d noted the fact back in London, touching her nose lightly with his forefinger before leaping off to find the drink without which he could not act, compose, even live. It should be taken in men’s company.
He went out while she unpacked the few necessary items from the trunks, then as usual stored her hemp bundle under the bed. She hoped that Robert would find his coffee on this strip of island, wherever it was, and some men to drink it with. Else it would be a sorry homecoming.
