by Janet Todd
When he returned she knew he’d drunk something, perhaps coffee, perhaps a stronger drink. She smelled rankness in the air from his breath.
‘It’s all vegetable patches,’ he said. ‘We’re among peasants with hoes and chickens, clam fishers who crawl in the mud and scarcely bother with shoes and stockings.’
He went into the little study, sat down at a rickety table and brought out his travelling desk, his pens and ink and good paper.
She tiptoed in to remove the greatcoat from the high-backed chair on which he sat to smoke. She ought to work on the water stain from last night, then hang it freely to air. But she probably wouldn’t. She often imagined domestic acts she had neither the patience nor skill to undertake. Still, it was better out of ‘his’ room.
‘The weather is disgusting,’ he said and turned to her with a weak smile.
He looked pale and still tired.
‘Just make a warmer sun,’ she responded.
‘That’s hardly the aim.’ He paused, his face rippling a change of mood. ‘It’s not some sort of gloomy vanity, you know.’
‘I know.’
She sensed the danger. He grunted, then poised his pen above the paper. She left the room and pulled the door to – gently and as far as it would go. There would always be a crack.
12
It was time to sort out how they would live here.
‘Here’ being where exactly? An island near the Venice she’d seen in Signor Moretti’s book. Probably the pictures were as misleading as the accounts of Italian weather.
She’d find out how much the surly padrona was going to charge for giving them bread and coffee in the morning and a little fish for dinner or tell where these things might be cheaply procured for her to cook. She would learn how the washing was to be done, how she was to exist as a woman with all a woman’s wants. She went out to explore.
Moving, she felt warmer and, as she came from the narrow path by the side canal, she saw a wide stretch of water. The day had cleared and across the water to her right were the shapes she’d expected, the campanile, the colonnades and gothic windows of the Doge’s Palace, the round solidity of Salute, Signor Moretti’s woodcut pictures made stone.
The silver was now more intense and her spirits rose, as, just for a moment, she hoped Robert might find some peaceful energy and she enjoy a little tranquillity.
But wouldn’t he discover it all a colossal cliché? Those so illustrated buildings? It was too contrived an ‘English’ scene for any fragile imagination. She herself liked a cliché.
Pray God that other cliché, Lord Byron, had left his palazzo. Let him be gone with his entourage of monkeys and badgers and dogs and parrots and whores and infants – or whatever else the scandal sheets reported about his person – let him be gone far far away taking his vulgar fame, his reproachful facility, his sneering pride out of Robert’s dark orbit.
Though, truth be told, she herself would have relished a sight of him in his gondola with whore or bear. She wished she’d been in the English crowd watching Napoleon strut on the prison ship in Southampton before setting sail into exile.
No matter: little difference between remembering what you’d seen and remembering what you’d imagined seeing.
To her, Robert’s imagination was now a physical body to be nurtured and cared for, like a difficult disturbed child. She’d intended to be its nurse and comforter; instead, in her darkest moment, she felt she’d become its dependent, a kind of parasite or tumour growing out of it. Caroline’s moods inhabited the house, changing shape but always with a mouth that might at any moment cry out and demand the attention she could never adequately give. Nor wanted to give in that case.
There she’d be in her little attic room in the dark except for the single candle with which her cold fingers traced the words of the filched magazine, and Caroline would summon Martha to bring her at once to the warmer drawing room. Her mother would be sipping pale tea in impetuous need of an audience. Then Gilbert would emerge with all his knowledge and experience from Caroline’s prodigious memory.
‘He travelled, girl, to see the habits, manners and customs of men. He spoke of France and Germany, but he knew of unseen places. He said’ – and here Caroline leaned towards her bored young daughter – ‘that a Japanese, to vindicate his ruined honour, will murder himself; and his adversary, scorning to be less pure, will entreat him to live long enough to behold him follow the honourable example.’
‘How did my father die then?’ said the child Ann.
Momentarily bewildered, her murky green eyes flashing, Caroline had barked at her to go away, to go now for she wanted rid of her there and then, shouting after her as she fled back upstairs, ‘It’s not for you to pry. He loved all things graceful, not wayward, girl, like you. He died as he lived, a gentleman.’
Her Italian was understood enough for Ann to discover most of what she needed – bread, fish, possibly where to get a little fruit from the few stalls along the fondamenta, the quayside of the main canal. They were set back in narrow, bent houses before little fields, patches rather, of artichokes and beans.
No one replied to her in Signor Moretti’s tongue. Indeed they hardly replied in words at all but simply sat on benches and looked away when she accosted them. They were jovial enough with each other on this low-slung island as if they were all in families, which she supposed they were, all exchanging greetings, touchings, demands, courtesies. But the sociability didn’t envelop the stranger, even a harmless smiling one as she supposed herself to be. She felt discouraged and disapproving.
She returned to the apartment with a few flat cakes, fishy biscuits and something like sardines in strands of vinegary cabbage. She couldn’t imagine Robert eating this but it was all she could find on this first excursion, and it seemed a local food.
As she entered their rooms she knew something wasn’t right. She braced herself.
Putting her eye to the crack along the door she saw he was pacing up and down his little study, talking to himself in splutters. From the smell oozing from the room she realised he’d lit one of the expensive cigars John Taylor had given him before they left England.
He didn’t immediately come into the sitting room and when he did – to go down to the privy outside – he said nothing to her as he passed. He was holding the half-smoked cigar between the fingers of his left hand.
When he returned, she spoke. ‘Is it no good?’ She couldn’t help herself.
‘Of course it isn’t. Did you think it would be?’
‘I suppose I hoped.’
Her body had tensed.
‘You hoped. But I’m not sure how much you care.’ He stopped, put his cigar to his mouth and puffed. ‘I need peace, yes, and calm, but also good company, conversation, a place of ideas and ferment. Do you think I’ll find it here among these water rats?’ He gestured towards the window.
‘There must be other people,’ she pursued. ‘We’re not so far from the Grand Canal and the palazzi where foreigners, writers, interesting groups must congregate. There may be Venetians you could get to know.’
‘Venetians,’ he spat out. ‘I don’t think so. What have they ever produced? Dreary pictures of saints. No vision.’
‘You haven’t looked at them.’
‘I didn’t come here to stare at antiquated stuff. From the dead past. What has even Titian’s work to do with me, with now? Damp, pockmarked. Look at this place.’
‘Let’s take a boat over to St Mark’s anyway and see the cathedral.’
‘Sightseeing’ – he threw rather than flicked his ash across the room – ‘that’s all you’ve wanted to do since we left England. You don’t know a place by looking at what others tell you to see.’
‘We haven’t seen anything yet.’
‘Stones, just stones, an empire of ruins. I will not live in a petrified world. It’s in the mind things happen.’ He jabbed at his head with his right forefinger.
The gesture reminded her of Caroline twirling hair round h
er little finger in jerks – like a small child, Ann had thought. She grimaced.
‘Oh yes, mock it. I know what you think of my work.’
‘It’s not true, don’t be so cruel.’
‘Don’t start, don’t be pathetic.’
He strode back into his study. She swallowed the tears and phlegm from the night in damp bedding, and felt a most comforting self-pity.
There was something about being alone, excluded, that was so familiar, so homely. ‘I never wanted you,’ Caroline had said when in a pet. ‘And I never wanted you,’ Ann had replied before fleeing upstairs. You knew where you were with someone like this.
Over the next days she wandered round the city, following hints from Nugent’s guide. She looked foreign among the painted people. Their faces were not always masked as in pictures of Venice in Signor Moretti’s book but invariably rouged and tinted as if to defeat the greyness of their weather. She liked looking at them; not so different from glancing at fashion plates in Caroline’s magazines. If they noticed her, they’d have thought her frumpish.
Curiously there appeared little shame at surrender of a thousand-year republic. There was more bustle in triumphant London, more purposeful busyness. Yet here people in the piazza and campi, along the dingy calli and rive, went about their lives quite assured. As if this little provincial conquered town were the centre of the world. It was a great skill.
‘Signora,’ said a voice, ‘I see from your small book of travel you speak English.’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘Indeed, that’s all I do. I thought I spoke a little Italian but time on La Giudecca has convinced me otherwise.’
She looked at the short, slightly built, clean-shaven and pleasing young man. A taller older one, fair with a faint moustache, possibly a small beard, was with him, close to his shoulder studying a newssheet. Only the younger one spoke.
‘Oh, those people do not talk Italian.’ He laughed.
‘That I gather. But you speak very good English.’
‘I have been in London.’ He held out his hand. ‘Giancarlo Scrittori.’
She took it. ‘Ann James, Signora Robert James.’
The young man came round so that the weak sun would not be in her eyes.
She glanced at the older man, now partially obscured by Signor Scrittori. He didn’t speak and was not introduced; he made no move to push himself forward or to walk away but stood completely motionless, paper in hand.
Obviously they were not, after all, acquainted, for the younger man didn’t look at him. Curious, for there was too little space between them for strangers.
She’d hoped there’d been two men – it would be more seemly to have a stray introduction within a group. A single man accosting a woman alone would not have been quite decorous in Holborn or Putney; she doubted it was so here.
‘I apologise for approaching you but I wish to help – this is my city – and to take an opportunity of practising my not so good English. I am wishing to start a trade with English people in things of luxury, little boxes, miniatures, some glass trinkets from Murano we call margaritini. No, do not fear I am trying to sell you something,’ he added as she drew back. ‘For this I need a good English.’
‘It sounds good to me, very good already.’
‘You are kind. But now, what are you wanting to see?’
‘Well, the sights, the obvious ones I’m afraid. I saw illustrations of them in a book of Italy I borrowed when a child. Indeed I have described them.’
Why say this? Was it better to be responding to a stranger as a spinster hack or a married woman?
‘You are a writer, then? My name should make me one but I am not.’ He smiled.
‘Well, sort of a writer, nothing great or very imaginative,’ she said quickly. ‘Just, you know . . .’ She trailed off.
‘Well, no, I do not, Signora,’ he laughed again, ‘but maybe you will tell me as we look at all those things you have already so excellently described.’
‘My husband is . . .’ She stopped.
He noticed the pause. ‘Perhaps I will meet your husband, he is a writer and not “sort of a writer” I think.’
‘What makes you say that?’
He grinned. ‘You have said about writing and not really writing, so I can conclude you are married to a great writer. The English are good at genius. We are not so – how shall I put it? – so very concerned with the attitude. We love skill, fineness. I myself deal in miniatures, small lovely things, not made by genius but much – what is the word? – craft. Though I have a relative, a sculptor, who might be what you wish.’
How unexpected he should discern so much, this stranger casually met.
While they were speaking she noticed again the taller man she’d assumed to be Signor Scrittori’s friend still standing close by studying his paper at intervals, perhaps watching them as well. She couldn’t be sure for he remained partially against the sun and his features were not fully revealed. Not enough to understand expressions. A stranger, she supposed, from the paler skin and something in his bearing and clothes. Dutch, German perhaps?
Did he disapprove of a foreign woman making such easy contact with an unknown man and one so clearly younger than herself? Maybe he was censorious. Or was he just glancing at her as a man might?
She smoothed her hair across her brow beneath her bonnet. Her clothes were drab but the blue silk scarf always brightened her face.
Perhaps he was English and heard her speech with Signor Scrittori.
When she looked again, he was gone. Probably he’d stood in his own thoughts, unaware of others. Men often did this.
The day was altering. Colour was seeping into the sky. In the puddles on the stones the water glinted. From a high building with gothic windows a woman was singing mechanically, cleverly, without passion. Technique only, no imagination, she caught herself thinking in Robert’s words. What relief, how sensible! She raised her eyes and smiled at the young man.
‘You are a godsend – you say that? I read the word in your newspaper.’
They had become familiar as they walked along towards the Rialto after their visit to the basilica. ‘There is a young girl, my aunt, my distant aunt you would say, wants me to give her some lessons in the English. Her gracious mother has most particularly asked, but I have not the time and not the craft. Perhaps you might like to take my place and have from her some woman’s hints of our city in return? You would be doing much service.’
A good idea to earn some money, yet she was dismayed that her need was so obvious.
They’d now crossed back over the Rialto bridge and were walking in the direction of the Jesuit church from where she planned to get a traghetto to Sant’Eufemia on La Giudecca. Near San Toma he stopped. ‘This is the palazzo where she is living,’ he said. ‘What better time?’
He reached up and grabbed the bronze knocker and handle. He banged it against the door twice and the sound echoed in the distance. There must be a cavern behind the ornate wooden door.
After a lengthy pause footsteps could be heard, along with some other noise, like a cat or irascible gull. An old woman opened the door, seemingly with difficulty. She was followed at once by a pretty girl with startling and startled eyes – rich, dark and deep, set in milky cheeks. They contrasted with the blue and grey of the day. A full flash of a mouth smiled. It was a long time since Ann had looked on someone as young – and pure. So strange a word to come to her mind, though so often on Robert’s lips. The girl, child really, opened her mouth to show pale even teeth. Her own, though a little yellowed, were good for her age, sensitive but not broken. These were white porcelain.
Giancarlo Scrittori inclined his head and spoke. ‘May I, Signorina Beatrice, introduce an honoured friend, Donna Anna, Signora James. We have a proposal.’
The girl took a moment to construe the words, then smiled a wide lilting smile, gestured politely and stood aside.
‘Permesso,’ murmured Giancarlo Scrittori as they began to follow the girl and the more
reluctant old woman into the portego, the wide hall of the palazzo. It appeared immense and glinting, the floor made of coloured, highly polished stones set in cement. Ann had seen nothing like it. A footman scuttled from one door to another.
Suddenly they heard voices from somewhere far into the interior. They stopped. Then what she’d supposed a seagull cry hurled through the space above their heads, followed by a female voice mounting higher and higher from a low soothing murmur; then a sound of metal scraping on tiles.
‘Not now,’ said the girl, still smiling. She pushed Giancarlo Scrittori back towards the front door. ‘Next week.’
Her face kept the same expression as Ann too was propelled over the coloured floor through the door and on to the stones outside, the girl still courteous but insistent, the elderly maidservant close by framing her from behind. ‘So sorry, Signora,’ she said, ‘so very sorry.’
Before even the usual farewells could be exchanged, the door had closed. Giancarlo Scrittori walked on with Ann. He said nothing at all.
She stepped off a traghetto on to the island, then steadied herself. The water in the canal had been choppy and there’d been too many in the boat for comfort, all precariously standing between the oarsmen. She walked slowly along the fondamenta watching her feet over uneven flagstones and puddles. It was easy to trip.
She was reluctant to go home – home, an inappropriate word for the cold, tense apartment. She stopped and stared into the sky.
Her eyes followed a gull swooping and circling, then settling domestically on the water. The bird was buffeted by waves and boisterous wind as well as by the swirl from passing boats. It was swished up and down but never dislodged or seemingly discommoded, the closed feathers unperturbed in its nervous environment. Were the webbed feet working strenuously underneath the calm feathers or did the bird have some skill in suffering so calmly, whether from boat swell or gusts of wind, with no ruffling?
She was admiring the bird’s self-composure when a group of six or seven seagulls suddenly landed beside it. All joined together and screamed raucously, flapping at each other over some blood-soaked stringy entrails she could only partially see from the way they were tugged about. They must have been thrown out by a butcher. Or did these birds find some small living thing and kill it and tear it apart with gusto? It was enough to make one laugh.
