A Man of Genius

by Janet Todd

  On Giancarlo Scrittori’s suggestion they’d walk in the woods of Carpenedo, get away from the oppressive Venetian buildings which kept in the mounting heat, possibly see flamingoes. She doubted Robert’s interest in such creatures. But they could at least eat pheasant – it was reputed to be tasty over there by Mestre, and much cheaper than in Venice. He might be better with a good meal inside him.

  The day had been muggy and lowering, the felucca that took them there filthy, and they’d seen no flamingoes. They might have been present, pink in the misty distance, but human eyes couldn’t spy them.

  Instead, coming out of the small bedraggled wood, they faced a half-dead tree thick with cormorants. ‘They are waiting for us,’ said Robert. ‘Look at their great forms against the sky. They eat the dead.’ Back in the apartment, with no preamble, he said, ‘This place is the pit of Tophet.’

  She went on folding clothes on the dining table, bracing herself. He so rarely engaged her nowadays that such a strange opening must herald more.

  ‘The pit of Tophet,’ he repeated to himself. He stopped and banged his fist on the other side of the table so hard he jiggled the heavy wooden bowl in the centre. ‘You don’t need brimstone and flames for it. You can forge tortures for all the damned, for yourself, without moving outside.’

  His eyes fell icily on her, then he looked away, gnawed the knuckles of one hand, stopped and rushed on, his voice rising with each word. ‘There’s enough pain, disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs and groans to do away with Tophet. You don’t need penal fire.’ He looked at her belligerently as if she’d argued the point. ‘Eternity adds little to malice.’

  What on earth was he talking about? What or who was Tophet? Who had Robert been consorting with that this weird, presumably Papist material was addling his brain? Surely he’d not gone into any of the baroque churches he so hated and been accosted by some mad unfrocked monk.

  He went on, his eyes now unfocused but his hands clenched. ‘Only the Almighty executes a relentless doom. We don’t need him, we can do it ourselves to anyone, to ourselves. Hellfire and cannibalism. We all want it, we would will everyone to damnation if we could. You know that’s true, Miss Ann St Clair. I know you feel like that. But you have no will.’

  She was about to protest, to cry out against it all, but he silenced her. ‘You want to control but can’t.’

  He’d been standing hunched over the table, now he sat down heavily, talking again more to himself than to her. ‘The pleasure of hating, carrying fire, pestilence and famine into the soul. I know, I know.’ He turned to Ann but his focus was beyond her. ‘You all look with such narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of the best of people; you wrangle, quarrel, tear one another in pieces, making a target, a mark to shoot at. I don’t understand all he says but this is what he means, what I mean.’

  ‘Who, Robert?’

  ‘Francesco Savelli, of course.’

  She was glad she’d been warned by Giancarlo Scrittori. Else she’d have been bewildered. Suddenly aghast, she blurted out, ‘You have brought him here, to this apartment?’

  ‘I have and why should I not? Isn’t this our “home”, our haven?’

  He was suddenly furious with himself, with the world, with her. He picked up the wooden bowl on the table. He was about to throw it. He locked into her eyes. He would hurl it at her. It would do damage. She winced but stayed standing by the pile of folded clothes.

  Abruptly, as if his arm had suddenly been paralysed, it went limp and the bowl clattered on to the table.

  The aborted act of throwing had sapped his vitality. He bowed his head on to the wood and put his hands round his neck. ‘That young man understands what I am doing. He understood Attila without being able to read it and why I am beyond it now. He admires me. ME. Is that so strange? Let others mock.’ His voice was high and choked.

  She couldn’t comfort him. And he wouldn’t have accepted comfort.

  Late one evening in the following week he remarked that there was something – he hardly remembered – he had to tell her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said as if an afterthought – but how could it be? how could it? ‘There’s a letter at the poste restante somewhere.’ He spat out the word ‘letter’. ‘A letter for Miss Ann St Clair, no longer Signora James apparently. It was a brilliant invention, of course.’

  He had a right to his fury. She’d kept the secret of her visits to Palazzo Grimani, her occasional dispatching of Signora Scorzeri’s boy. So now they could be traced. He had a horror of this – because of her they would be known by ‘authorities’.

  For once his rage didn’t matter. There was a letter for her.

  Who could be sending it? Could cousin Sarah have followed the trail through Moore & Stratton? After all, the pair had first come together with their help. For it had been through someone at this office who knew someone who knew a cousin of Charles Hardisty’s who knew an Aunt Louisa whom apparently she shared with Sarah that she’d first been brought to her cousin’s door. But she doubted that Sarah would expect there still to be contact after so many years.

  It must then be Dean & Munday – perhaps, after all, they were willing to advance money despite her having sent them nothing, or perhaps Mr Munday was asking for some speedy work because another hack had failed to deliver. That was as unlikely as a loan.

  From wherever and whomever it derived, the letter made her heart beat quickly. It came from outside the iron circle of her present life.

  ‘I must get it at once,’ she exclaimed. Then she added for no decent reason, more as a kind of echo of what she believed a normal person would say, ‘It might be from my mother.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s dead and leaving you some money.’

  ‘She would not then be writing.’

  ‘You assume it’s she who is writing then? What a lot you seem to know,’ he said wearily. ‘Anyway the poste is closed the rest of this week. The boy said the office would be open on Monday morning. What did you pay him to do this dirty work?’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘No, why should he?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me this at once.’ She tried to keep her voice level.

  ‘I’m telling you now. I thought you hated your mother.’

  She let the idea hang in the air. ‘Hate’ was too uncomplicated a word for Caroline. ‘I doubt it’s from her. How did you hear of the letter?’

  He was going back into his study, annoyed at the questioning. ‘The boy came to me,’ he said without turning. ‘He thought a husband might be told the business of a wife of whatever name she chose. You kept that a secret, didn’t you, Madam?’

  20

  She walked passed San Moisè towards San Luca near where she’d been sometimes to buy cheaper week-old vegetables for Sunday. She felt conspicuous. People were staring at her, as Giancarlo Scrittori had been too polite to do on their last meeting.

  No Venetian signora would take so little care of appearance, let hair straggle from under a cap however sultry the day. Happily, Mrs Bigg-Staithe was no longer there to titter and turn away, for she’d long since travelled on to the more popular destinations of Florence and Rome, her spouse brimful of Robert’s opinions.

  She would pass as a local peasant if she weren’t so clearly foreign. The bones of her skull, her hair, her browning but still pasty face, her manner of walking, everything screamed it. The hot summer had finally struck. So care did not seem so necessary to an Englishwoman. It was different for natives.

  Her pupil had gone off laughing and smiling to the country house leaving the troubled Conte in the care of the useful Signora Zen, the toothless housekeeper, and the other servants. With the pretty girl had gone the contagion of beauty, the sense that it rubbed off – even if the mirror always told another tale. She would visit the house again when everyone came back after the sultry dog days – if she herself were still in Venice.

  Even Giancarlo Scrittori had gone somewher
e north in the mountains for a week or two. She missed him but was glad not to provoke his pity and relieved to see no more newspapers. She had no interest in England’s shoddy affairs.

  She’d crossed to the Piazza San Marco early on the Monday morning, long before the poste restante office at Palazzo Grimani could have opened.

  She was not the only person to arrive early. People received bank drafts and promissory notes through the office as well as personal letters, and there was an air of anxiety among those who anticipated the opening.

  While she waited, she strolled on through the small campo of San Luca into Campo San Paterian past Tommaso’s shop, already welcoming business with its open door. The jacket she’d enjoyed buying there was now much worn but some cheap cotton muslin she’d had made up near Le Zitelle had been supplied by him after Giancarlo Scrittori had quietly explained her circumstances. It helped keep her cool in the stifling rooms.

  At precisely the correct hour, to the surprise of the people waiting, the outer door of Palazzo Grimani was opened by a swarthy man – a Turk or Arab? She’d not seen him when she’d come later in the day. He asked each person’s business in guttural Italian, then silently waved them on. A serious bustle agitated the air, and the faces of those who mounted and descended were preoccupied.

  Despite her eagerness to know who’d sent her letter and what it imported, she was not the first on the stairs. Behind her as she went up sounded other footsteps. She calculated perhaps two men: there was no rustle of skirts and the tread was heavy. She was hot and held her breath as she ascended and listened.

  By the time she reached the office she was gasping for breath. Happily the room was airy with good natural light. It fell on ledgers and inkstands, quills and papers, tied together in tape of different faded colours.

  While her agitated breath became more regular she moved into line behind a squat elderly man and broad middle-aged woman sweating in tight purple bombazine. The latter was expostulating with the clerk. As far as Ann could make out, she was insisting there was a letter for her from her husband Signor Moro in Genoa enclosing a banker’s draft; they must be hiding it. As her voice rose, another man entered slowly from an interior room. He was flaxen-haired with chilly eyes, an optical glass hanging on a chain round his thin neck. The woman turned to him and began her tale again but more ingratiatingly, in lower pitch. Under the scrutiny of the blue eyes the words began to slow. Gradually they failed. The German, or Austrian, Ann supposed, then came round the counter and politely, firmly, moved with the woman towards the door. She appeared surprised but accepted, her anxiety as well as desire seemingly quenched by this authoritative show.

  Just the elderly man, then it would be Ann’s turn. She held back; it seemed an age till he stopped mumbling his business and a package was produced and signed for.

  It was her moment. As she stepped forward to give her name and ask for her letter, she turned slightly, realising that the next client was not as thoughtful as she had been.

  A man was standing too close. He was in line but courtesy demanded some distance even within the office, for transactions were often private and signatures guarded. She glanced at him, surprised. Though he was looking away, something about the shape of the head, the stance, the side of a moustache, she was not sure what, made her think of the man she’d wrongly supposed Giancarlo Scrittori’s friend so many months before near the Gesuati. Perhaps it was his foreignness that was not quite the usual Austrian version and yet was not quite English or French, perhaps Dutch? It could, of course, quite easily be the same man, for in this small town foreigners did their business in only so many locations; the post office would surely be one of the main meeting places.

  Perhaps he knew no better than to crowd a person, for he’d stood close to Giancarlo Scrittori on their first encounter. That was why she’d noticed him.

  It was not sufficiently threatening to protest, just irritating enough for her a second time to raise her eyes towards his face then lower them to indicate displeasure. But he was still looking away and didn’t catch her glance. She turned her attention back to the clerk.

  She prepared to present her credentials as Ann St Clair but found she had no need to say her name; the clerk, who’d recovered from his episode with the vociferous lady and been bored by the old man, was now offhand. Almost in silence he looked at the name on her papers, then ordered her to sign and pay her postage fee. She wanted to see the letter first, but had not the skill to argue. She leaned over the counter and signed where she was told.

  Her heart beat in her ears as she took the letter.

  Whoever had sent it, he or she was addressing her as what once she’d been, not what she pretended to be.

  Her name Ann St Clair was followed by the address, the poste restante in Venice. The hand was unfamiliar, not Caroline’s for sure. From notes she’d had to take to Mrs Graves, she’d come to know it. Like a person’s voice, writing was not easy to forget, even after many years.

  The letter was fat. Fat enough for a bank draft? A postmark, almost obliterated by some other stamp, told her that the letter had come from London, presumably a clerk at Dean & Munday’s had addressed it – for they remained the most obvious senders.

  Without looking at him further, she brushed past the man who was standing a little further away now. Perhaps he’d not realised his discourtesy. She went swiftly down the stairs.

  Outside she leaned against a wall and felt the sun directly on her face. She opened the letter carefully so as not to tear any of its contents.

  It was not from Dean & Munday.

  To her surprise it had come from Moore & Stratton in the Strand. The sender was a Mr Laurence Holt. He wrote solely to enclose a second letter.

  This one was smaller, the paper thinner and the hand spidery. It was addressed to Mademoiselle Ann St Clair at Moore & Stratton. For a moment she was too perplexed to act, then she began taking it apart. She had to be even more careful than with the original letter for she could expect much writing on the flaps. But, as she unfolded them, she saw they were empty. There was no further enclosure.

  What she read in the middle of the opened paper was short and in stilted English, underneath a carefully printed Parisian address.

  It said, ‘Mademoiselle Ann St Clair, your mother is very ill, soon to die. I wish you come before too late.’ It was signed ‘A Friend’.

  Her back was heavy against the wall. She felt a hard stone pushing into her skin through her muslin dress. She stood straight, then swayed a little and leaned back again.

  How long did dying take? How long had the letter been waiting for her? She had not been to Palazzo Grimani for some time, and she’d not sent Signora Scorzeri’s boy for over a fortnight. The letter could have been sitting in that office for many days.

  ‘I’d be dead for all you care,’ she heard her mother say distinctly. She’d complained so often her complaint had ceased to impress her daughter. Was it true?

  Had not Caroline said she died with Gilbert? Well, he and she had been there long after his death. Caroline’s stories were the memories of Ann’s childhood, much stronger than anything that had actually happened to her. If Caroline died in body, her words would still be left over. What death was now being proposed?

  Caroline and Gilbert: her parents’ narrated life washed over Ann like an immense red and yellow wave as she stood there on the hot stones of Venice. It obliterated closer time and space.

  The music, the paintings in Vauxhall Gardens where he’d taken Caroline. He as the accepted lover and husband, yet all meetings as trysts. ‘You know,’ and Caroline bending over the table to look right through her young daughter who was sullenly sitting opposite while her mother consumed her apple pudding, ‘you know, he knew my innermost thoughts and I of course knew his. He knew, oh I admit it, my melancholy tendency, my loneliness – for what thinking being is not alone . . . ? and he admired all of it, all of me. He could awaken me to such joy.’

  Here was grown-up Ann leaning against a
Venetian wall near Palazzo Grimani going back to Vauxhall which she was quite sure she’d never visited, knowing it was far more distinct in her mind than the Accademia or Frari or anywhere else beside her now.

  She propelled herself automatically through the dingy narrow calli round Palazzo Grimani and down towards the finer area of San Marco towards the traghetto that would take her over to La Giudecca. All the while Caroline in her head went on talking while her daughter clutched the letter that summoned up all this over-coloured memory.

  ‘Such sights as we saw together, the jewellery at Cox’s museum, so costly, so glittering, the silver and gold tiger, yes life-sized, the curiosities of Montagu House, the silver swan that could incline its silver neck and pull out a silver fish from the glassy shifting water. Imagine that! And Gilbert, dear Gilbert with only eyes for me and caring nothing for such a mélange – he used the word – bought me a bright silver, gold and crystal pendant.’

  ‘So where is it?’ child Ann had asked.

  ‘One loses even one’s most valued possessions.’

  She believed in the absent pendant, just as she believed in the thin sliced ham at Vauxhall.

  Only once when younger, much younger than thirteen, perhaps ten, though already a reader of stories and already suspicious, she’d asked if Caroline loved Gilbert.

  ‘Ah,’ said Caroline, ‘I loved and what is most wondrous, he accepted my love. He was so grateful for it. When I brought myself to admit it, he took me in his arms and said that he knew I had risked so much by loving, for most people resisted the great happiness of love. I did it willingly.’

  ‘Was that because you were so old?’ asked Ann for she’d not failed to notice her mother was more ancient than the mamas of other girls at school.

  Caroline had boxed her ears so that they tingled even when she lay on her back in bed.