A Man of Genius

by Janet Todd

  ‘My brother the Conte is very gifted,’ Beatrice whispered to Ann again as they mounted the stairs, ‘but there is something in his head not so, how to say it? not so comfortable, so comforting to him or to anyone. He becomes very excited and then his work goes so well but at other times he is down the bottom of the steps. He has these melancholy moods like a – ’ she paused for a word, ‘like winter coming. Nothing stops them. He howls. Poor Francesco.’

  ‘But not so poor perhaps if he can create such things.’

  ‘Oh yes, he is well regarded in Venice. But he puts over his creations his white cloths and like tonight shows people for moments only. He is a strange one. Mama worries herself over him. She becomes quite sick with it. When Papa was alive he used to take Francesco to our estate in Friuli and try to make of him a hunter and a man, but he comes back much worse, sometimes growling like an animal, more often sunk into such black feeling he is sitting down there doing nothing. He curls up his arms and legs like a mouse in a nest.’ Fearing the wrong image Beatrice curled up her own hands and nestled them in her breast to make her point. It was a poignant gesture. ‘Mama was in agonies. Now, as you see, she – how do you say? – humours him.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps that’s it.’

  They entered the dining room and a little later Robert followed. He’d heard Ann and Beatrice talking but hadn’t wanted to listen. Signora Zen slid silently in behind and took her place.

  Robert’s exultant mood was over.

  Back at the table there were marzipan sweets, candied fruit, almonds and oranges, and dessert wines in coloured glasses.

  Ann was on edge. She made no effort to hide her glances from Robert. She hoped he would drink no more. He knew that quite well.

  He was no longer speaking, except when spoken to, but he remained polite, even attentive to the Contessa. Ever the moderator, Giancarlo Scrittori tried to engage him in conversation or bring him into general talk, but he shrugged the young man off.

  Signor Verezzi and Signor Besan, who’d kept their heads bowed through much of the meal and their mouths working greedily – they were evidently used to the dramas of the house – were released by the Conte’s absence and enough wine to get their own back on the English guest who’d been so talkative while they’d been silent.

  ‘The Austrians sent a coach and four horses to the patriarch of Venice. To draw him along the water!’ Signor Verezzi laughed out his words. Then he glared at Giancarlo Scrittori, who bowed his head over his glass. He too knew the habits of the company.

  ‘They have given us new judges,’ said Signor Besan, his jutting jaw becoming more pronounced. ‘Contemptible.’

  ‘It is as well to respect one’s masters,’ said Signor Verezzi in English.

  Robert looked up, letting a scornful expression settle on his face before he lowered his gaze. He seemed about to speak, then perhaps feared he couldn’t muster the language. The Italians were switching between their own and English, but it was not easy for foreign guests to intervene.

  Ann spoke to prevent Robert. This way of acting had already infuriated him in London. ‘There is at least peace,’ she said.

  The Contessa cleared her throat to take up the point but, before she could speak, Signor Verezzi went on, now addressing Ann and Robert directly, ‘We live by the Austrians but they are another race of people. Peace, pah.’ Then more quietly, under his breath, he added, ‘Better to give hatred and contempt as Signor Besan suggests. Better not to plan and act.’

  The Contessa put her arm gently on his sleeve and smiled a gracious smile to the company.

  ‘Affenarsch,’ muttered Signor Verezzi, who, Ann saw, was much affected by the wine. He was not to be silenced. ‘We are poodles of Vienna.’

  ‘The French never tried to get into our minds. They just took the art and trinkets and went away. Napoleone brought a giant despotism – ’ Signor Besan’s speech made the Ss slur and he stopped, swallowed and concluded in a loud voice, ‘We are now tethered by midgets.’

  ‘Certainly, certo,’ said Signor Verezzi. ‘We must ask leave to piss in the canal.’

  Giancarlo Scrittori kept his eyes on the table, seeming to investigate the weave of the damask cloth.

  For the moment Signor Besan abandoned any effort to intervene. He nodded, catching the Contessa in his eye.

  ‘Peace is important,’ said the Contessa.

  ‘The peace of death,’ Signor Verezzi continued, throwing the words directly at Giancarlo Scrittori, who raised, then lowered his eyes again, studying now the handle of an ornate fork with its Venetian lion mark. It might have been an intricate jewelled dagger laid out for sketching. Beatrice, who’d been silent, sent an encouraging look towards him.

  There were matters here Ann couldn’t fathom. Secrets and tangled webs she failed to discern against the candlelight. The Contessa must know how things played between these three men. Why invite them to the same table? And why with her and Robert?

  ‘Look at the state of our houses. We cannot afford to repair them.’ Signor Verezzi waved his hand round the brilliantly candled table with its silver and glass glinting in the flames. ‘The palazzi will fall into the canals and the canals will fill up. It will become a town for visitors to stare at. Mudbanks and seaweeds at the last. A wreck floating out to sea.’

  ‘Venice is one big prison,’ said Signor Besan, ‘like all Italy. We are a manacled people and you English sit with our oppressors.’

  Robert was still silent, so again Ann felt she had to answer, ‘But not all of us, surely,’ she said.

  ‘All Europe is in despotism,’ said Signor Besan, more slurred than ever. ‘But there will be change. I say it. The bayonet in the hands of idiots does not rule for ever.’

  The Contessa roused herself, this was not good public talk. She glanced at Giancarlo Scrittori, then back at Signor Besan. ‘Signori, please, we talk no politics at the dinner table. It does not go with food.’

  A silence followed.

  Suddenly Robert spoke, looking only at his hostess. ‘You are right, Contessa. There is no purpose in this for we are all slaves.’

  Ann was as surprised as Signori Verezzi and Besan. She hoped he would not go on.

  ‘Venice was not conquered in a thousand years,’ said the Contessa with finality.

  ‘But she has made up for it in the last decades, Austrians, pah!’ said Signor Verezzi.

  ‘They do not even attend the opera,’ said Signora Zen suddenly. ‘It was half-full last night.’

  As they left much later in the Savelli gondola through a cold clear night, after what seemed to Ann hours of men drinking and women pursuing their desperate small talk, Beatrice remarked, ‘We will have our lesson tomorrow, Signora. It may be that at last we will get to Lord Byron’s tales.’

  There, after an evening of avoiding it, was the Name. Living with Caroline should have taught Ann never to feel secure.

  ‘So that is what you do to earn the green jacket. Read that rubbish to a young girl.’ Robert was undressing in the chilly bedchamber, flinging down his clothes as if they’d offended him.

  ‘That’s unfair. She wanted to read him. We aren’t there yet. We read Mrs Radcliffe and talk.’

  ‘That’s the height of your teaching?’

  ‘They pay well.’

  ‘And we live off this activity through the patronage of that coxcomb Scrittori? We are eating, you would say? Well remember, Madam, that we have eaten my substance for a good long time.’

  ‘I am not saying that. I know.’

  What she wanted to say, to shout rather, was that the jacket – and when had he seen it for she’d not worn it this evening? – was turquois-coloured, close to blue perhaps but not green.

  The spiral began. They were both almost too tired for it.

  16

  After the brilliance of late winter it had become grey, with flurries of snow that stung the face. Ann walked the calli and rive muffled in wet wool. It was clammy against her skin. Her skirts had grown heavy with the water she
could never quite avoid in this saturated town.

  Then the weather changed again. Snowflakes glittered and disappeared. Humidity evaporated over the water. Everything was on the move. Seagulls swooped down near the quays or were tossed about in energetic air waves if they tried to rise higher. Or they bobbed on the churning canal as sudden winds spurted over the lagoon. When they were stilled for a few minutes, long-billed sleeker birds arrived to skim and dive in the shimmering water.

  Sometimes the sky was blue, sometimes azure, sometimes almost bleak, livid, while the lagoons held extremes of dark green, creamy indigo and a thick leaden. The waters were shallow and yet at such moments they seemed to hold great depth: their coloured layers leading to an unfathomable darkness, even to a fancied fanciful nothing.

  One unstable, almost spring day Ann stood on the wasteland behind the vegetable patches and boatyards on La Giudecca looking over choppy water under the fluid sky. It must, she mused, be filled with the rubbish of centuries, drowned sailors, collapsed huts, sunk boats, the luxury that Venetians so loved to paint and flaunt.

  The wind dropped and the water grew smooth. The sky lightened. Her spirits lifted just a little with the brighter weather. Near her feet she saw nervous fish to-ing and fro-ing in the clearer water.

  Out in the southern lagoon a boat with a faded orange awning seemed stranded on the sands beneath the water. It twisted a little whenever any craft nearby, or even distant, made a swell that reached it, however faintly. There was no fishing from it; indeed, as far as she could discern, it held no person at all unless the dark patch at the end was an unmoving head. A boat carrying a corpse all alone? San Cristoforo was far away in the northern lagoon and it was not heading for the burial grounds on the Lido; there was no ritual of death that such a little boat could form.

  As she watched it turned slightly. The morning was now growing misty, the sun coming through a veil and making the sky the sort of light blue that cloaked the Virgin in faded Renaissance paintings. With the higher tide would the boat float quietly into the mist beyond Chioggia, out to the Adriatic and on till it rotted and fell with its dead body eaten by gulls into the sea, the bones filtering down? Or would it be beached on the sands of the Lido or Pellestrina, leaving a corpse to disintegrate on the stones of the new sea wall fronting the Adriatic?

  It would rot and stink on the blocks until discovered by a cavaliere. He would hold his elegant nose and turn round his horse, then in time nonchalantly alert the authorities to a broken boat and a rotting body near the dunes. Leaving before his name could be asked, for no one in this secretive town wished to be questioned about anything by anyone in authority.

  She reined herself in. Was she moving into her own plot? Would she imagine herself the corpse in the boat? More likely the shape was a pot to hold clams taken from nearby nets.

  Perhaps these morbid fancies made the ordinary more bearable. She shook her head at the notion. Instead she thought something more disheartening: that the dead boat, the smelly corpse, the murder, the fever, the plague event, whatever might have caused the death, if death there’d been, the abandoned and broken heart, the dunes or the deep sea – nothing was so bad as what waited for her.

  She was being dramatic, but drama, like morbid imagining, was comforting.

  She walked quickly from the side of the south lagoon over the waste ground to the fondamenta by the large canal. It was not far. La Giudecca was a mere strip of islands.

  She was rowed across the canal with washerwomen towards the Gesuati planks. On the water, even for this short and now habitual crossing, it was hard for a person once as landlocked as she had been not to feel a little exhilarated.

  She was at the Palazzo Savelli at the appointed hour. The bewigged footman let her in. He smiled in greeting. She knew now that his handsome face was ruined by the absence of front teeth. Did the Contessa not care for the dentist’s skill when it came to her servants? Or were the toothless ones kept as foil to Beatrice and her pearly teeth?

  The girl and she had become friends, as far as one could across years, place, background, culture and language. They’d started to read those Oriental Tales of Byron that Beatrice had yearned for; she was gripped by the story of a man part dashing pirate, part inconsolable lover. Ann had no more respect for the sensational stuff than Robert but enjoyed a good plot. It reminded her of her own work. More about men – but change the sex and style of the author and where was the difference, she a hack writer of cheap gothic, he a celebrated poet – and a lord?

  ‘No,’ said Beatrice to her enquiry. ‘There is no more interest in Milord Byron here now, as a man I mean, not much since he became cicisbeo to La Guiccioli and followed her to Ravenna like a pet spaniel. The talk of the English – and I think you do not mingle with them?’ She moved her pretty head in enquiry. ‘No? Well I tell you, the talk is again of the principessa, the Princess Caroline. You know your people are here making discoveries these past years. The Prince – he is King now, yes? – he tries for divorce.’

  Beatrice took in a sudden breath and glanced quizzically. ‘You look so uninterested, Signora, but I will try to amuse you by telling you all about it. It will be such a good practice for my English.’

  Caroline had gossiped with Mrs Graves and Mrs Pugh in Putney, agitating their monotonous days with scandals kindly provided by their silly but entertaining rulers. Ann hated these half-forgotten memories. She was still a child in that.

  ‘The talk is of the servant again,’ Beatrice continued undeterred by Ann’s withdrawn expression, ‘a servant who has long time been more than that, Bartolomeo Pergami. Italians like to be included and he is an Italian from nowhere and from no very good family, so it is more not proper.’ She stopped and looked directly at Ann. ‘Perhaps, Signora, you do not care for gossip at all?’

  ‘“Involved”,’ she said, ‘not “included”. Everyone likes some gossip, Beatrice, when not malicious.’

  ‘Is there such a thing, Signora? No matter, I will tell you what is much said.’ She moved her chair a little closer.

  ‘The Princess was at the Grand Britannia, the hotel, you have seen it? She was staying there since a long time. She made the impression.’

  ‘Yes, I did hear that,’ said Ann, feigning now more interest than she felt. When they first arrived Robert called the scandal a foolish story concocted by Italian informers about a German whore and her English whore-master.

  ‘But then,’ Beatrice was saying, ‘then, Signora, she left the Grand Britannia and went to live in a private palazzo. So near here it is impossible not to know, and news travels up and down the Canal Grande like I cannot say what, a waterfall that goes both ways.’

  She smiled at her invention. Beatrice was growing up, thought Ann. She would soon overtake the gentle Giancarlo, who, she rather suspected, had some interest in his pretty cousin. If cousin she was, for it seemed a rather inclusive concept in Italy.

  ‘Her bedroom – and this we have from Signora Valauri, who lives very close – it comes off the big salotto. One side there is a door to other rooms. Here Signora Valauri closed one eye – blink, I think, no? – and moved her shoulders thus. She would say no more, but asked who was in the rooms. Then Mama, who was present and usually not so interested to hear gossip, at least not when I am beside her, mentioned the Princess’s other gentlemen, so she must know more. Signora Castelli joined her and asked too – she is a little vulgar, I think, though she comes from a most noble family – “Where did all those gentlemen who were said to service Her Royal Highness sleep? Where was Hieronimus, where was the boy William Austin, Captain Hownam?’”

  ‘My, my, Beatrice, you have an amazing memory for names, even strange English ones. You have everything pat.’

  ‘Pat? Is he another lover?’

  Ann was surprised that this – and there was much more – amused the Contessa, who, from the little she’d seen of her, appeared an austere, intentionally stately lady.

  Beatrice surmised her thoughts. ‘Mama does not leave the h
ouse often because of the Conte. She and her friends do not always have gossip but some talk like this makes the tarocco table less dull. In the old days when Papa was alive and before everything changed, we had a chaplain in our house and Mama talked much to him of Francesco when he was a boy and already a little strange, but he is long gone from us.’

  After pausing, she added sadly, ‘Mama prays much but it has made so little difference. Signor Verezzi tells her so.’

  Ten days later Ann was by the booths on the Rialto trying to buy some cheap material to be made up as a nightshirt for Robert. She had no skill to mend the superior, now worn-out, garments he’d brought from London. There she was accosted by Giancarlo Scrittori.

  ‘Oh, Signora Jamis, why do you not come to my cousin Tommaso’s shop? You disappoint me.’

  ‘His stuff is too good for what I am after today,’ she smiled.

  ‘No, no, he will give you a nice price. And, see, you are now wearing the turchese-coloured jacket that is so becoming to you.’

  ‘No, really, I am content for now to look in these cheap stalls.’

  ‘Let me buy you a coffee and a cake. I hear such good things from my young cousin Signorina Beatrice that I would like to do something for you. We – you and I – had meant to meet I think some time to see more sights and I to practise my English. But you are busy?’

  ‘Well, I often am, but not now. I will come with pleasure.’

  They stood at the edge of the trattoria’s marble counter and drank the strong grainy coffee that seemed air and sustenance to Venetians. She noticed Giancarlo Scrittori was holding an English newspaper, Street’s Courier, limp and much handled. How had he come by it? Was Giancarlo connected with that English society Robert was so keen never to know?

  He saw her looking at it and moved his hand to wave the first sheet. ‘You are watching my paper, I think, and wondering how I am with it.’ He grinned. ‘There is no mystery. It was passed to me by Giacomo, my friend, who had it from the Santangelis, one of whom is an agent for Sir Edward Colefield, who had it perhaps from his client or Sir Alexander Trotter. He is here often and brings newspapers, mainly Gazettes, when he travels. It is not old and is full of what you English so like, the royal investigations. You may have it.’