by Janet Todd
Feeling a little more comfortable but aware that she might none the less appear more hot and bothered than she wished, she walked slowly through the cavernous hall and towards the stairs that rose to the room where she and Beatrice usually delighted to take their lessons. She was surprised and a little hurt that the girl didn’t come out to greet her. She’d made a special effort to travel from La Giudecca in a time of holiday and on a day that promised at its meridian to be as sultry as any they’d suffered.
Then Beatrice burst through the opposite door from the room where the Contessa usually presided over the card or tea-table. She ran down the marble steps and along the hall towards Ann, holding up her skirt, yet nearly tripping in her haste. As she came close, Ann saw that her face was swollen and blotched by crying, her dress disordered.
‘My dear Beatrice, what – ?’ Ann began. The girl stopped her by coming up and whispering in her ear, ‘Oh, Signora, I cannot after all have lesson today. Excuse, excuse.’
‘Of course,’ said Ann, ‘of course, do not worry. But what has happened?’
Beatrice moved away slightly but went on whispering, now in a high tone that made her words quite audible beyond themselves if anyone had been by to listen. ‘There has been a terrible thing. Francesco has hit our mother.’ She added quickly, ‘It was his sickness, not Francesco, who did it. But Mama is distraught.’
She took Ann’s arm and held it tightly, ‘I can tell nobody else but you – for I know that you will understand. Your husband, Signora, and my brother. It is no good.’
The girl looked at her with such appeal it lessened the pain of what she said. She, Ann, would understand: Beatrice and she both knew why it was no good . . .
Beatrice squeezed, then lightly embraced her. She slipped back up the stairs and into the room, leaving Ann alone.
She would like to have helped this girl for whom she’d come to feel so much affection, but there was nothing she could do. She had no solution to provide and no energy to use for anyone beyond herself. She was as helpless in the palazzo as in the depressing apartment on La Giudecca.
She turned round and walked slowly back along the hall towards the door. She was let out silently by the servant who’d so recently let her in. At first the woman kept her eyes fixed downwards, then, as Ann moved outside and on to the stone steps, caught her eye and gave her a sad, toothless smile.
She returned to the apartment, her mind brimful of dread. It was a dread so obvious, so palpable that anyone on the boat or calli on her route back could have seen and smelled it. Fortunately so few people were out in this heat; the rest kept themselves for the night. Her dread enveloped her as she dragged her weary feet upstairs.
By now it was the hottest time of the day. Few with pale skins and a memory of cold and mist could bear it easily. She knew how provocative it must be for Robert, the heat and his choler agitating each other. She knew all this so well.
Had she left him alone he might have gone on melting through these sultry days, getting thinner, more listless but disintegrating slowly – like a large vegetable growing over-ripe, mottled and loose, finally decaying.
But she didn’t leave him to go on his own way, to his own particular destruction. She simply could not bear it.
So, instead of letting well – and bad – alone, she went into his study, not waiting for an answer when, after several small, then increasingly louder knocks, no answer came. Not accepting that the lack of response was a blank and utter rejection of her.
She knew that what he’d recently written was nonsense – she’d read those crumpled pages with their repetitive inanities. Yet on this day she went right up to him, leaned over his shoulder and reached for one of the leaves he’d pushed aside. At that moment he was making no pretence to write.
She meant to look and soothe. So she said to herself. She meant to touch his shoulder and stroke the back of his head where the hair was too long and a little matted with sweat. She might have done all this, but did none of it.
Instead she put her hand on his arm as she leaned forward to his desk.
How could he want this, any of it, what she was doing or had planned to do? Want it from any woman? How could he respond? Violence was all he had, all that was left of his power. He was no vegetable rotting beyond movement, he never would be. What he did on this and on any occasion was reactive, intuitive and inevitable.
It was afternoon when she limped down the many steps, dragging the palm of her hand against the uneven wall. The young Frenchmen had unexpectedly returned to claim their rooms but they were out now for she’d heard them earlier tramping down the stairs, laughing together as usual. So the building was empty. She could have no fear of being accosted by Signora Scorzeri.
She had to be outside, to gulp the heavy air. A temporale, a giant storm, was about to break through the oppression, to counter a tension that made the whole sky and earth and water into one large, complicated knot of anger.
Let it burst and rain down water and stones and pitch to wet them all and wipe out this filth and horror.
Drama or melodrama? Did her predicament translate too easily into hackneyed words? She’d once thought Sarah naive to associate her stories with her life. But the reverse?
She stood looking towards the pictured Venice. Not her Venice.
Against the odds she’d become fond of it, the tawdry glamour, its gaiety, its insouciance about its failure of nerve. An Englishman would have cringed for years. Venetians never did.
She liked the decaying buildings, their roots deep in the slime that was kinder than water to the wooden stakes. She liked the great high decorated palazzi – called palaces by the awestruck English though in reality nothing more than big terraced houses quaintly painted. She approved the laconic acceptance of the secular in the religious, the churches adorned with figures of those who’d paid for them as often as the saints they honoured. All wonderful.
She wished she’d been born of this city, been one of the gay painted people who did as they pleased and were pleased with what they did. They kept the outside embroidered with ceremony and tact and exclusion. For her it would never be homey, homely, never home. With all her heart she wished it could have been.
‘It’s a charnel house,’ Robert had said. He dismissed it with a theatrical wave.
‘There are no more dead here than anywhere else.’
‘There’s a whole damned island of them. They don’t all fit in there, Signor Balbi said so. Corpses float about in their own boats or are tipped out in the lagoon. Look down, you’ll see skulls through the water. It’s a place with no future.’
‘A great past,’ she’d said, mistress of banality as she was.
‘A past with no future is nothing.’
She waited for his words to leave her mind as she struggled through the rising wind, stumbling while she held tight to the scarf she’d tied round her head to cover her face and its darkening bruises.
The voice subsided but she couldn’t rid herself of one special word: you will not muzzle me. You will not. She would not. No, indeed. She would not try. Dangerous dogs that have tasted human blood are greedy for more.
She had no idea how long she stayed out. The great wind huffed and puffed and promised a deluge, delivered lightning, but in the end paused, hurling only a few large drops on to the dust. She felt the storm still rumbling and lurking nearby but, for the moment, it hid. The stinking smell that had come with the clammy weather, the careless supervising of intricate canals and crumbling outlets, rose up between the buildings and along the waterways. It infiltrated every sack and pocket of unused air in the city. The sewer of the mind sent its filth through the body but was no match for this enveloping and clambering stench.
She couldn’t return, not yet. She could cross the Canal again – perhaps to check if her passport had been signed. She knew the answer. But she would go none the less, for where else was there? She needed a purpose.
As she limped down behind San Zaccaria through the delta of narro
w calli, in the distance she spied a man she was sure was Giancarlo Scrittori, in black mantle. She’d thought he too was out of the city. She must avoid him; he shouldn’t see her like this. She could hardly speak to him through a muslin scarf and he’d know she was holding her ribs. She kept her eyes on him, hoping he would soon move away from her path.
But instead he was joined by another, shorter, fair-haired man. He embraced Giancarlo. The Italians were more tactile than the English, less bashful about endearments between men. But this embrace was something different, longer, more intense. She was glad she’d not been recognised. She could savour her envy alone. Then they pulled apart as they were briefly joined by another man. She saw only his back. He was tall, familiar perhaps – or was she eliding differences in her damaged state? Was everyone except herself and Robert becoming images of each other?
She waited and at last all three moved off, the two shorter men arm-in-arm.
She went on her way, found the consular office closed as she’d expected. Then she loitered where she could before turning back towards the water and the crossing. She must return to the apartment – she had to, this was her life and her cross. The walking had made her mind a little less numb and she was thinking that, if she were not to kill herself or him, they must somehow live without this dreadful conflict.
That she hated him she knew perfectly well. It made no difference.
Best to stay with practicalities. Surely it would be only a few more days before she had her papers. If she didn’t find more lodgings in another town before she left, perhaps Robert could simply go somewhere cheaper in Venice. He could ask Signor Balbi, who’d seemed to enjoy his friendship – though it was some time since Robert had mentioned him. But he was hardly speaking to her. Perhaps something out by the Arsenale or Sant’Elena might be found. It was said to be less costly around there. She didn’t know how he would pay Signora Scorzeri but . . .
On her mind whizzed, countering hopelessness with hopeless plans, her eyes swelling black and purple underneath the muslin scarf. She even thought she might return with money, for in Paris she could reach Dean & Munday more easily, perhaps send them Isabella; or, the Secrets of the Convent which she could finish on the journey at stops on the way.
Yet all the while she could see no future, just a black tunnel which she would enter.
23
It was evening. She’d been out from after midday until dusk. She’d had no sleep the night before and little rest today. She’d sat for a while on the step of a humped bridge with no railings like a peasant woman come to town to sell her country wares, suddenly fatigued, impeding the way of more elegant walkers who nudged and almost kicked her as they passed.
Her body ached all over. Not only the damage but the pain of shrinking, of shame. She was wearing away, her ribs sticking out uncomfortably. There was a flatness, almost concave quality, to a belly where she’d once been perhaps plump, if not full. She knew the thinness for what it was – as a woman knew her state when in the first stages of pregnancy her body filled out just a little, but not enough for others to see or pry. A mind could do this. A mind impaired by lack of sleep.
She had to go back, she said to herself again. If she stayed out she would need to eat and she had little money with her. If she’d had more, she could perhaps stay a night in an inn and try to think. Maybe order a gondola to take her out on the lagoon and let her sit there. Or go to the Lido and . . . But for any move, anything at all, she needed to go back for money, for some things. She feared what she would see when she returned. But what worse could happen? What else could happen?
Well, she knew exactly. He could conclude the farce.
She crept in. She would get her money from the bag under the bed, then she would do what she would do – whatever it was.
As she mounted painfully to the top, she heard the Frenchmen going out of their apartment. They must have returned while she was out. They were speaking quietly and stifling laughs as they went down the steps and opened the outside door. She didn’t hear it bang after them. Perhaps they were careless, as young men could be.
She reached the apartment and opened the door, leaving it ajar to let in some air. In the sitting room silence engulfed her.
There was no snoring from the bedroom or the little study, so Robert was not asleep; no moving, no breaking of things, no throwing of crockery or wooden bowls or books, nothing to suggest that other objects within the world beyond her body could staunch his anger. Nothing.
He could not be here. Her heart jumped. She could have a few minutes alone, perhaps hours. She could work out what to do in peace. And when he returned she would be gone or she would fake sleep and he would leave her be.
As her mind settled, she noted signs of him in the sitting room despite his absence. A chair was tottering against another as if he’d pushed it roughly out of his way while he moved from his study. He must have gone out and still not be back. But his Swiss gold watch lay on the table beside some breadcrumbs and a hungry procession of ants. His winter greatcoat, so little needed these broiling months, was on the floor. There’d never been anywhere to hang it properly, so there was nothing strange in that. She picked it up automatically, righted the chair and draped the coat over its back. She looked at the watch again. Why was it there?
The door of the study was closed and no light came through the crack. She could peep through as she often did but she would not invade his space. As she determined this, her fury rose. Was she of so very little account, so very contemptible that she didn’t even dare to touch the man, to press open his door?
Through the crack she could see nothing. A new unpleasant smell, beyond unemptied chamber pots, assaulted her nose.
She pushed tentatively at the door and looked in.
He was hanging there with the girdle from his morning gown tied round the high ceiling beam. The face was towards her. It was mottled red, the tongue turned some terrible colour and sticking out. There was blood, dark blood, on the hands and on his shirt. The expression exaggerated what she’d seen before, the grimace, the devil, her devil. The breeches dirty.
On the floor by some broken quills, scattered as if thrown down rather than falling, she saw the knife they used for chopping fruit when they ate in their sitting room. It was covered in blood. She moved towards it, picked it up, looked at it briefly, unseeing, then brushed it against her light dress so that it was stained by the darkening blood. The knife was still dirty.
She laid it back down on the floor. Her hands were sticky. She was aware but did nothing to clean them. There was nothing clean on which to clean them.
Her eyes roamed away from the hanging thing but could not fix. Her throat was filled with phlegm. She squeezed it to stop herself from vomiting. She blinked several times. She was so very tired. Was this a nightmare? Would she wake?
Then her eyes found the papers on the floor, an oddly limp pile, some scattered, one caught on the high-backed chair, itself tumbled over. She picked up one sheet from the floor and looked at it. There was writing on it. It had been written by the living hand, the one that still kept its blood inside.
She stared at the words. Robert had written his name over and over again in capitals.
Her name, her name, must be there. It must be. Was she not part of him? But she looked down the page and on the other scattered sheets on the floor, now desperately. She was not there.
He has done this thing to get away from me, she said aloud. From me.
Her eyes swivelled to the stack of limp papers which she assumed had formed his book, his work, what he had written before the sun seemed to sear his brain and stop the flow. They were wet. That’s why they looked limp. A smell rose from them and assaulted her nose. She became aware of it. He had pissed on the pages.
He had stood there drunk on wine perhaps or fuddled with laudanum or whatever he had picked up in Venice to take him out of his right mind. Yes, she could see it. He had fumbled with the buttons on his breeches. Then he had pissed on his
life’s labour. She could as well hear the splash.
She went back into the sitting room. The door to the apartment was still open. She left it so and sat down.
A Voyage Home
24
Robert was there. But not there. Present as he always was, bony but bulbous, now filthy, obscene, overpowering, powerless. Dripping and trickling.
She felt no conscious shock though her cheeks were wet as well as red and bruised.
She did not cut him down. She could not. Outside, the summer storm was rising again. That was why it was so very hot, so oppressive. It was about to thunder. This time it would rain as well.
Then Aksel Jakobsen was there.
‘I was passing,’ he said.
How could he be?
‘I saw Signor James on the fondamenta not long ago. He was walking strangely. He seemed giddy, I thought he would fall into the canal, so I followed a little. Then I went off and returned, perhaps to be of help. I saw you enter. You screamed.’
‘I have not screamed. It’s the wind outside, a storm is coming back.’
She was speaking lucidly. She could hear herself at a distance. So how had she not heard a scream, if there’d been one?
‘His wrists are slashed as well and his breast, there’s blood. He must have tried other ways. Look, the kitchen knife on the floor. He bungled it, he failed. He did too much. He always does too much . . .’ She was shaking as she babbled. The door to the study was ajar. Anyone could see inside.
‘Be quiet please,’ said Aksel Jakobsen.
She could understand neither this man’s words nor his tone.
‘Signora Scorzeri, she’s out now but she will return. She comes back late from visiting her sister, with Rosa. She will think I did it or helped him do it. She will. I will be the murderess. She has heard things. She will know.’ Her teeth rattled, as if they were someone else’s, loud and metallic.
