by Janet Todd
The memories, the ridiculous wordy memories – that sliced ham, that swan, the tiger, the gold, silver and crystal pendant – began to subside only as she crossed over the canals in La Giudecca towards the apartment. What of all this could die?
Without much desire to see her mother, she would travel to Paris – realising now that she and Robert had passed through the city the year before without knowing that Caroline was living there. She was going in response to that conventionality of which Robert had so often accused her.
Of course here was, too, the escape she’d longed for. But she’d go resenting him and resenting the time away from him.
He would say he was glad she was going, he would be free of her clinging – love, he supposed she called it. He would not mind if she did not come back.
She would smile a bitter smile. But she would return. She had to. She would not abandon a part of herself.
When she’d entered the apartment and knocked on the open door of his study she’d told him her news. It was then out of sheer weakness and fatigue that she fell on to a chair in the sitting room and sobbed. He slammed the door from the study not to hear the noise. She carried on long after the emotion that brought it on had ceased.
21
She enquired about tickets and bookings from the few offices still open in the heat-racked town and requested a pass for travel to France. Everything took time.
She must use the interval to find them lodgings out of Venice, somewhere where the water didn’t stink in the high heat and the rooms were cheaper. Without her in this city Robert would fall even further into debt: he had no notion how to rein in expense.
When she was gone he might leave and live somewhere else: he might not be there when she returned. He might not. And she would not know where he had gone.
Then she would not be free of him – that was a hopeless dream – for she would spend her days imagining him sitting, smoking, talking, drinking, becoming again for someone else all those people he had lost. A Bianca? The idea, so tenacious, could still kindle that passionate anguish that surely by now should have been cold dead, not just resting.
She trusted Tommaso for, when she’d come to buy his cheap muslin, he’d not urged her into anything more costly. He was from outside Venice and might be able to suggest other nearby towns where she and Robert could live more cheaply.
Padua, he’d said at once. The place was full of students. They didn’t want expensive rooms. He’d heard she taught English to the Savelli Signorina; she might find pupils there among the young men.
If they moved she’d have to give up her lessons with Beatrice. No Padovan student could mean as much to her as this young girl. Her heart felt heavy at the idea of losing her company – at starting over, and being still with him. Yet Beatrice had hidden something from her she should have known.
She determined on the visit. If they liked the town they could move and start over again.
Perhaps Robert would grow calmer. Perhaps some of the savagery had come from the Savelli influence. Perhaps in a new place he might be renewed. Perhaps he could work his charm once more and gain them some more credit. Perhaps.
She doubted all of it. Since the departure of the Bigg-Staithes, he’d made less effort in his manner and dress. Signor Balbi was not a poor man but he was a traveller and was not arrayed so finely as his fellow citizens: sometimes he appeared shabbily clad, so perhaps he noticed less. But surely even he had seen the change in Robert.
His paunch was smaller, no longer firm – she supposed it was because he drank more than he ate. The bald part of his head looked unpolished, and his tawny hair once so cared for round the rim was now too long. It made him seem an old man – or a mangy dog.
She pretended they were going to Padua to see art as well as find other lodgings. But as usual he showed no interest. The glories of Venice had not awakened him; he anticipated no more pleasure from old art in more decrepit towns. But Signor Balbi had said he should visit Padua, he had relatives at the university there whom his friend might like to meet, and Robert remained polite in his response to him.
Giancarlo Scrittori had once said they must see the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. Like Robert she felt beyond looking at painting, but there might be something comforting about a quiet Virgin well executed. And Christ? There was only one passion in his life – and it was all over quite quickly. Then what rewards! She had less time for Christ.
From Mestre they travelled in a closed public carriage, early because the heat was already mounting. It hardly went down even at night but still the early morning was the best. Other passengers smelled worse than their hens trussed up and shitting into a basket under the seat.
And what did they themselves smell like by now? They were so far apart and yet they must smell the same, two English strangers fed on foreign food.
When they arrived in Padua they found the door to the chapel with the frescoes firmly closed. A sign declared the doorkeeper away on a private festa. A few other people stood outside as well, disappointed by the closure, a couple with a child, the woman in a close bonnet despite the warm day, some young Germans – brothers perhaps – with a squat clerical tutor. All of them waited irresolute as if they expected the doorman to return despite his notice.
While they stood there, another foreign visitor walked up, a tall middle-aged man with a trimmed beard, moustache and tightly curled brown hair thinning at the temples. He looked at Robert and Ann because, she first thought, he too was English. But he did not speak to them. This was a blessing, since Robert was in such a painful, smouldering mood he would have found casual talk impossible. He’d taken the journey badly.
The stranger was familiar – but she was unsure of her judgement. She’d thought the man with Giancarlo Scrittori was the same as the person in the post office. Now she thought again that this was the same man. That the first two figures were the same was possible. That all three were the same was improbable. Surely the man before her was neater than the cloaked figure near Giancarlo. But he was very like the man at Palazzo Grimani who’d stood too close to her and whom she’d seen a little more distinctly.
Most probably her eyes were playing tricks. Was everyone already falling into types in the way old people saw them, indistinguishable from each other across time or place?
The German youths were expostulating with their tutor and each other, uncertain what to do next but eager to be off somewhere. Robert started to move away, Ann followed.
They walked through the town, decaying picturesquely in the sun. It lit up the once magnificent porticoes, sagging in front of dilapidated buildings. They passed by the flower market, selling tall closed blooms she didn’t recognise and little bouquets bound in pink ribbon.
A smell of newly made bread floated on the air. On the stalls were pastries in different shapes and small cakes covered in sugar. Rows of crudely painted earthenware pots stood on trestles, with gaudy glass ornaments from Murano. How Robert used to cherish cups and bowls, handling them as a connoisseur! All in another life, another world of tea parties with Mary Davies and Richard Perry, of coffee and pots of ale with Frederick Curran and other rollicking friends in Cheapside.
She tried to hurry them past the stalls since they had so little money to squander. He might spy some flowers and be tempted to buy.
She need not have feared for he seemed in a daze. The beggars, who usually claimed his attention, pleaded and tugged at his jacket in vain.
Yet he did not walk at his natural quick pace but sauntered. She wanted time to check the places Tommaso had suggested. She’d not stressed cheapness when she’d enquired about lodgings but she doubted either he or Giancarlo Scrittori, whom she’d earlier questioned, were much deceived about the state of things. The change from the turquois jacket to cheap imitation Indian muslin told its tale. Such places as Tommaso recommended would be on the periphery, beyond the grassy spaces. They must leave time to visit.
Robert was not to be hurried. He gestured annoyance when she tried to
urge him on by taking his arm. He tugged it out of her grasp. Then abruptly and for no reason she could see he sped up. She had to scurry behind him.
They were now passing the cathedral, an ugly plain facade before an open square. Meaning to visit briefly, they found themselves instead through a thick velvet curtain in the baptistery. Robert carelessly handed over coins to a sacristan. She wondered how many but dared not ask. A few candles were already alight in the gloom. The sacristan added another.
They had entered a different world, marvellous, crude and ridiculous. She looked around, then at Robert, expecting him to register contempt.
‘Giusto de’Menabuoi,’ said the sacristan. Ann had never heard of him, Robert didn’t listen. She swivelled her head round the sides, then wished to flee from what she saw.
To her surprise Robert didn’t turn away and scoff. He appeared enthralled by the deranged and whirling vision covering all four sides: an apocalypse, a revelation of Revelation. She felt danger at once. This rapt attention couldn’t be good. His nerves were strung so tight they must surely slacken or break. She remembered Tophet.
She followed the channel of his eye. There was a leopard with seven snaking heads emerging from it. Why this confusing of forms, this mixture of reptile and mammal? Why had the painter not made the whole monster scaly like a snake or crocodile? It wasn’t disturbing, just absurd. Perhaps it was biblical; she knew her ignorance.
She moved away to glance at a demanding Christ, one whose glaring expression proved him aware of the trouble he was already causing and would go on causing. She continued her tour, staring briefly at the hundreds of ranged male and female saints paying court to something or someone, the Madonna perhaps, it was unclear.
All the while Robert remained transfixed before the revelation. She returned to him, eager to persuade him to leave. The frescoes were perhaps more interesting than she’d first thought – but she’d had enough.
‘It is blasphemy,’ he said in a hoarse voice. He was looking at bishops’ mitres on the heads of beasts.
‘Symbols of power, that’s all,’ she said.
‘Not that.’ He glared at her incomprehension. ‘No, the blasphemy is the whole thing. It’s against reason.’
She was aware of a figure in the shadows. A light from the few candles the sacristan had lit now let her catch the glint in the eyes of a man who was looking at her and Robert rather than at the pictures. It was the stranger whose stare she’d caught outside the Giotto chapel, the foreigner she kept seeing, or imagined seeing.
Such recognising, real or mistaken, was a gothic trick she often used in her novels, putting her mysterious characters over and over again in dim churches and on misty mountains and in caverns, showing up, pop, like a jack-in-the-box whenever the plot required them, then spiriting them away when they’d served their turn. Her mind must be infected.
Yet the stranger really was staring, surreptitiously perhaps but definitely, and she was sure she discerned in the flickering light that distinctive almost imperceptible moustache and small beard. He stayed in the dimmest part of the chapel. Could she trust her senses?
What could he be about? It was no surprise that foreign visitors to Padua or any other Italian city should go to see similar sights. One would expect to find the touring traveller, guidebook in hand, in front of each Titian or Giotto, trooping from one masterpiece to the other before heading home with relief to tell his tale and hang his copies on the mansion wall. Nothing strange therefore in meeting the same man at different shrines.
And yet she and Robert had come reasonably fast from one chapel to another, and they’d not paused to look at the flower stalls. It was curious that anyone else would take the same route or be so insensitive to the unison of light and smell – would have come straight through the market to arrive here at exactly the same time.
Still, here the stranger indubitably was – she was now sure of it though he was still lurking in the dimmest corner where a candle hardly shone on the painted wall. It was silly to be jumpy. She’d thought at once about what they owed Signora Scorzeri. But that was crazy thinking. No one would have travelled all the way from Venice to Padua for the sake of hounding them for debts that couldn’t have been worth such trouble. Certainly not a stranger. Had Robert really offended ‘authorities’? Was there something in his past that justified his occasional furtive looks into dark corners?
It was dim in the baptistery, yet the stranger’s fair colouring showed in the wavering candlelight. The man could be Austrian or German, there were many about in northern Italy – and yet, she thought again, there was something different in him that argued against this.
If he were indeed interested in her and Robert, it would perhaps be in part because he’d heard her voice in front of the Giotto chapel or in Palazzo Grimani. This would argue him English after all and perhaps in need of English company. But he had been here a long time already. That is if she were right in her sightings and not being madly suspicious. In which case, he could have made himself known before. From even the little she’d seen of him he didn’t seem a diffident man.
No good explanation sprang to mind, but she remained convinced he’d been listening to them earlier: he had had the look of someone who understood what they were saying.
She’d no more time for pondering the mystery, for Robert once more dominated her mind.
She went up to him and touched his arm. ‘Shall we go? We have quite a bit to do.’
He shook her off roughly, then turned to stare at her with eyes full of blazing hate.
She took a step back. His looks had almost the same violence as his physical assaults, eye and fist equally powerful.
Again the self-questioning. Why was she here in this dreadful place instead of on the road to Paris with or without a pass? What was the hold of this incubus over her?
Or was there no need for one: was she spoilt for ordinary life now? Did she not need Robert as an addict needs opium, a drunkard his killing brandy?
She walked away to gaze at the large figure in heaven. In her disordered state she could read meanings everywhere. The seated man with the burning eyes huge and majestic in the midst of a circle of little people. If he had been fairer and balder, he could have been Robert. How mad a thought was this! Supporting this immense figure, this rampant potent man, was a serene blue-clad Virgin.
That is what Robert had needed, the virginal mother, large enough to lean on, calm enough to rely on always, but quite secondary, totally enclosed in the majestic circle of his divinity, his genius.
She moved on, trying hard to stop her mind allowing such imaginings. There were simply biblical stories told in pictures. She’d been taught some of them in school but most by Martha in a rudimentary way; they weren’t part of her as they were of Robert – and of Caroline, she supposed. She was glad for this escape at least.
Now she noted on the wall a whole procession of diminished women, a woman coming out of the man, a man with many wives, a man willing to sacrifice his son, asking no permission of the mother who’d borne him, a drunken man being copulated with and covered by his women. All these men, Joseph, Christ, Noah, the empty angels, all had piercing glittering eyes that followed the watcher. The Virgin’s eyes followed no one outside her world. She had no need to look at others – for her man, her god, was above her.
The candle was guttering and the sacristan must be eager for them to go. But Robert was insensible. There he was now by the apse, transfixed by another ridiculous beast with seven serpent necks. She returned to stand by him. She didn’t dare touch him.
‘He made a third of the stars fall down on earth,’ said the sacristan, presuming their ignorance. He said much more but her Italian was not good enough to penetrate his accent and keep up. Robert heard nothing. He looked fixedly at the beast like a dragon with a monstrous bat’s wing.
She could make no sense of it, much less of Robert’s fascination. Apparently one of the dragon’s seven heads wanted to grab a child from a woman but was p
revented by a god who took it instead, leaving the woman to go off into the desert. It was an unsatisfactory story as plot or morality. Perhaps she was not giving it enough attention.
She turned back to look at Robert. He must not see her – he hated to be stared at.
She saw enough to understand he was not, after all, much interested in the beast, the woman, the child, not even the stars. His eyes were, she now noticed, fixed on another panel, on the books.
‘Words,’ he said loudly. ‘It is about books, potential books, words too sacred, too pure to be written down. And Christ, all about the word, of course, of course but not words at all, just purity in letters.’
He looked wildly, not at her but through her and around. She gazed from him to the pictures. Something was very wrong.
‘See, there are seven angels in seven attitudes. The first played his trumpet and hail, fire and blood rained down on the earth and a third of all the green things died, the grass, trees and stems and leaves, in his mind, do you see? The second angel played his trumpet so that the seas stirred and boats fell under the waves for a flaming mountain was thrown into the sea and the sea turned to blood. Look! a third of ships and sea creatures were destroyed in the blast.’
He said ‘look’ and ‘see’ but the command was not addressed to her or anyone else. He was speaking now with horrid rapidity. Had he understood all this from the sacristan? Surely not for, with her better Italian, she’d caught almost nothing of what he said.
‘The third angel played his trumpet and a burning star fell from heaven and a third of the earth’s rivers and springs became poison, so that anything that drank dropped down and died. Always a third, you see. Not all as you’d expect. More than decimating, less than destroying, so clever. The past not as bloody as the present. The fourth angel blasted away and a third of the sun and moon and a third of the stars were darkened. So that the night and the day lost a third of their light. Again not all, but just enough to make everything dark, dreary.’
