The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “Come on, Bal, good dog! That’s enough.”

  But Balthasar didn’t agree but buried his long proboscis further into the matted grasses. And then he looked up to indicate that Japheth of the noticeably, beautifully pricked-up ears was walking toward us to join us for the rest of the walk. He had not accompanied Beatrice, Mary, Mrs. Noah, and Ham to France, but had chosen—I believe the active verb is the correct one—to remain in Dengate with myself.

  • • •

  Well, here I was in Bond Street. For all, as I was often pleased to proclaim, that I was a Londoner born and bred, I scarcely knew Mayfair, and that day felt a stranger in its elegant, symmetrical, expensive streets. During the journey up to town, remembering the gloom of my evening walk and the discomfiting dreams of the long night just past, I had done my best to banish thought altogether, and more or less succeeded. What lay beyond the train windows had greatly aided me. The mists having lifted by midmorning, Kent, beneath sun and clear sky, stretched on either side of the rails a real feast of ripeness, apple-orchards and nut-orchards laden with fruit and peopled with pickers, hedges so full of haws they could appear as they passed by as much red as green, and cornfields like palettes of gold with blue flowers at the edges. And the month’s predominant reds and golds continued into the capital itself, and I wondered—as I nearly always did on my return visits—why I had not done enough justice during my growing-up to all its many parks and gardens.

  Yet Bond Street was urban enough in all truth, smart façade succeeding smart façade, many of them with uniformed flunkeys at the door, uncongenial, not to say alien to, the kind of person I was, who was finding it difficult enough getting used to living in the kind of house that was now my (and my own family’s) home, under the ownership though it still was of my mother-in-law’s undereducated yet fiscally shrewd and therefore well-heeled farmer-brothers. What a figure I must cut to call on an enterprise with the pretensions of Giorgio Fatterini’s. The suit I was wearing, smart enough for most of the Dengate occasions to which I was thought good enough to be invited, surely looked a touch common beside the attire of the young men I was now seeing just about everywhere, coming out of grand townhouses, stepping into the offices of financial or legal firms with the elite as clientele, or standing behind the luxuriously decked windows of the street’s raison d’être, all those galleries, jeweller’s, specialists in furniture and objets d’art, picture-dealers.

  And here was the destination, and it was exactly two minutes to three o’clock. The premises of Gregorio Fattorini and Son stand opposite the turning into Conduit Street (if you’re coming down Bond Street from Oxford Street), and I could not disguise from myself what my body was, in all its components, telling me: that I was filled with a dread of such a heavy intensity as, even at the most difficult moments of the history I’ve been unfolding, I had not yet experienced.

  I wanted to hear no details at all of Hans’s dying; I have none of the morbid inclination for such things that many, including Advertiser readers, apparently have. More, I have the greatest possible aversion to having them inflicted on me, often by people whose business it is not. But in the case of Orazio Martello his business it indubitably would be. My old—well, I’ll call it friend—had died with his head cradled in this man’s arms, and how I wish he had not seen fit to tell me this! Typical foreigner’s, typical Mediterranean’s love of sensation, thought I. An Englishman would have kept such a fact (if “fact” it truly was) to himself, might have known it would prey on the mind of the letter’s recipient, and, out of good taste, decided to spare him such mental discomfort. But not Signor Martello of Rome, not he! His letter I now had by heart—it had even got in the way at times of the russet splendors of the Garden of England—and I did not think I liked it, in other words that I liked the character of its writer. The way he boasted of his knowledge of me and my provenance was impertinence really, particularly as he had given me no satisfactory information about himself, not his age, not his line of work, not the circumstances in which he had drawn so close to Hans Lyngstrand as to be taken into both his personal and his artistic confidence. So much so in truth that he had applied himself, both in the sculptor’s lifetime and after it, to seeing that his capolavoro saw light of day.

  And behind these questions never more insistent than when I finally stood outside the window of the Fattorini gallery, other ones menacingly lurked.

  (i) What information did Signor Martello have about Alfred Johnston, to call the man that, the real begetter of The Sailor’s Revenge?

  (ii) Did he know what intimacy there’d been between Hans and myself?

  (iii) Had Hans told him that I—cruelly, disgracefully, as it now seemed—had shunned him totally?

  Behind the glass of the window four large oil paintings of Italian landscapes (for such I correctly took them to be, pines and ruined temples and snow-capped mountains above inky-looking lakes) in massive, many-layered, gilded frames stood propped up on a red velvet drape that uncomfortably could not but remind me of the hangings and table-covers of Dengate’s Banstead Lodge. This was not a comfortable place, but because of this entirely fitting for an interview which was not going to be comfortable either, though I was going to leave it as owner of—apparently—a capolavoro.

  Even outside so fashionable an establishment as Fattorini’s a group of cloth-capped men loitered with a collection-box and a huge placard telling the world in huge scarlet letters: “WE ARE DOCKERS. HELP US TO THANK THE GREAT CARDINAL FOR WHAT HE DID.” Well, I had no spare money on me to give Cardinal Manning, despite approving of the sterling work he’d done, and, what’s more, I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t want to embarrass myself—in Bond Street!—by conversing with these triumphant, strong, but still obviously indigent men. So you could say that for these moments embarrassment triumphed over dread; certainly it was on the side of inevitability. Taking an almost theatrically deep breath, and looking away from the dockers, two of whom were no older than myself and probably like me had young kids to worry about and care for, I crossed the threshold of the celebrated Mayfair concern. I tried to reduce my awe at this dark interior and at the tall bearded Levantine figure in skull-cap and dragon-patterned maroon robe worn over an impeccably tailored suit now gliding slowly over the close-carpeted floor toward me.

  “Signor Giorgio Fattorini?” I inquired, in answer to the quizzically interrogative expression on this exotic individual’s face.

  A negative noise. An almost pitying shake of the head. “No, no! No more!” Then he gave a sigh: “Is gone. Totally gone!” Then, lest his words had suggested death, he added with a mocking smile: “Is with Royal Household. Is taking Household more beautiful things.”

  Difficult to know the right thing to say here. But all around me, in this shadow-land of an interior, what a profusion of Italian scenes and classical heads and busts, on shelves, tables, inside open-doored cupboards, on top of them, underneath them, and none of them, at first glimpse anyway, taking my fancy in the very least, some exposed to the gaze, some discreetly covered with cloths. All so proud, so unhomely, so reeking of high prices! But well could I understand that there could be a superfluity of such stuff here as to make its owner think of offering choicer morsels from it to Buckingham Palace or Osborne House. The man—he was about forty—was smiling at the effect his words had had upon me. What a contrast he made, in his conjuror’s outfit above a suit from nearby Savile Row, to the September sunshine outside, to both the stylish young-men-about-town and the victorious dockers enjoying it as it splashed down on Bond Street.

  “I am Son,” the man informed me in his unrepentant un-English accent and manner, and smiling at me though he had just played me an irresistible practical joke, as, in a muted sort of way, I suppose he had. “Gregorio Fattorini.” He half-bowed. “And you are young man come from country?”

  I didn’t feel this instant description of myself flattering. Down in Kent I was—or, rather, until taking residence in my present home, had been—thought a Londoner, wh
ose ways smacked of coarser but livelier streets than those of Dengate burghers. But up here in town I apparently struck this sophisticate as some clodhopper stumbling into such temples of culture as these premises to better his knowledge of the arts.

  “Not at all,” I countered, “I have an appointment at this very hour, three o’clock—I have the telegram in my pocket to prove it—with one Signor Orazio Martello.”

  The man’s eyes, the color of old leather, noticeably brightened. “You Mr. Martin Bridges?” He spoke as one perfectly familiar with my name. “But how not?”

  “I am here to—”

  But at that—“So you are Mr. Martin Bridges?” inquired a figure stepping forward from the deeper shadows of the back of the gallery. (I nearly wrote “shop” here, but that word would never do!) “Well, well! You’re not a bit how I’d imagined you!”

  But his surprise at me was nothing to mine at him—especially in the context of his surroundings and of the only other person apart from myself nearby. I could not for the first minute or so, determine his age. My eyes were first drawn to his hair, and truly amazing it was, long, longer even than was the custom of those lascars I’d glimpsed at London or at Channel Ports docks, though nearer to their style than to any other I knew. It flowed well below the shoulders in thick, dark, matted-looking lines of ringlets. A gold ring dangled from his left earring, and, caught by a shaft of sun, winked brightly and almost painfully at me through the gloom which framed its owner. But for all the cool and shade of the room this Signor Martello—for obviously it was he who had just made his appearance—suggested summer, and long, arduous but contented exposure to its fiercest sun. Not only was the face below the tangled black hair well-tanned but the arms bare from just above the elbows down and the backs of his hands were the brown of some fully ripe but entirely hard pear, of which the peel is warm with a saturated sunshine that has not yet managed to soften the flesh. Around his neck this man who had summoned me peremptorily to London was wearing a red, white-spotted handkerchief knotted in front, above the Adam’s apple, and contrasting with a white satin short-sleeved shirt more like a vest than the equivalent garment young Englishmen don for cricket. His gray flannel trousers were baggy and a mite more conventional.

  “Let us shake hands,” he said. “This is an important moment for both of us, surely?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said uneasily, “it can’t not be.”

  We stepped toward each other, and like a member of the chorus in a play, Gregorio Fattorini moved away from us, back toward a desk placed nearer the front window of the gallery. Signor Martello, as he came up to me—he was a little taller than myself—immediately imparted a sense of suppleness and general physical competence. And as I shook the hand he proceeded to offer me, and felt its muscularity extending to the tips of his fingers, I found it quite easy to imagine the individual it belonged to carrying out the hardest and most exacting labors a sculpture could demand.

  But his eyes—interestedly scrutinizing me even during the handshake—were not, as the whole gypsy-ish appearance might have suggested, dark—but a remarkably light blue. Their color disconcerted me. Far from reminding me of the dark depths of deathbed attendance and arduous travel undertaken for altruistic reasons, they proclaimed a freedom from care, almost from responsibility itself, an insouciance. Irises like his invited, it seemed to me, a pleasant, cleansing ascent into the azure of untroubled skies, and here I was, in my dreary, inexpensive, “common” best suit, with dread still lodging in my body.

  “Well, what shall we talk about?” my “envoy” from Hans Lyngstrand asked me, releasing my hand as if he found doing so—doubtless my tension was palpable—a relief. “What do you want to talk about? We have no lack of subjects at our disposal.”

  Which, I wondered after he’d spoken these sentences, would be more accurate as a description of his voice: that it sounded both Italian and English, or that it sounded neither Italian nor English. He articulated, I thought, more precisely and emphatically, particularly on the final consonant of any word, than did the normal Englishman. On the other hand, he had the roll, and the confidence of delivery, of a native speaker. And he was idiomatic in his language. I was reminded of the “part and parcel” and “safe and sound” that he’d employed in his letter to me.

  I was, of course, quite thrown by his verbal invitation, so what had been preying on my mind ever since the receipt of Signor Martello’s letter came to its forefront.

  “What did Hans say about me?” I all but gabbled in response. “You wrote that he spoke about me, particularly toward the end”—I recalled the crucial and somehow troubling adverb—“repeatedly. But what was he actually saying?”

  Yes, I was even at this very instant afraid to learn that the poor dying young Norwegian had recited to the man before me every syllable of our nocturnal exchanges. And surely it was not so very improbable that he would have done, especially when far too sick to keep a bridle on his brain let alone his tongue. And would not this signor with his wild ringlets and his fair-ground trinket winking just below the right ear seem a readier recipient for such stuff than most men?

  Signor Martello shifted his stance and, doing so, indicated a low table on which stood a large, indeed monumental sculpture completely covered by a black velvet drape. Underneath it I could see the forms of two figures, and instantly knew that beneath the dark material stood The Sailor’s Revenge, for did not two figures comprise that work? He grinned, displaying startlingly regular, startlingly white teeth, and in doing so reminded me of somebody—yes, somebody I knew reasonably well—but I could not think who it was. His changed expression made him look younger than on his initial emergence from the back. He was surely about my own age, (then) twenty-seven.

  “You have a friend,” he said in a slow, wry, mocking voice, “who suffered a painful illness, a distressingly painful one, and who took four whole days to give up the ghost (some doctors would say that he took ‘four whole years’ to do that), and who expressly asked to have his capolavoro sent to you, Mr. Martin Bridges of Dengate, a procedure which has involved great cost and great effort—and all you are interested in, when you meet the man who held him at the very last, and who has gone on faithfully to carry out his wishes, is—‘What did he say about me?’ Me!”

  Who could not feel crushed and ashamed at this rebuke, to which there could be no riposte? Nevertheless—

  “That isn’t ‘all’ I’m interested in,” I protested, “not by any means.”

  “Perhaps it was not fair of me to get you to speak first. This must be an awkward occasion for you—for me far less so, though I am a little travel-weary still. I shall not keep you any longer from dear Hans’s bequest to you, The Sailor’s Revenge.” And before you could say Jack Robinson, Mr. Martello (for suddenly I was sure he was essentially English) had flicked off the black drape, and two figures on a plinth presented themselves to me.

  Of their genuineness I had not a second’s doubt. I recoiled.

  “This is terrible!” I cried. “I can’t have it. Don’t want to have it!”

  “But you have to have it!” this probably English gypsy-man said. “It is law that you do. It is a legacy.”

  “And legacies can’t be refused?”

  My interlocutor drew himself up as one offended, “I do not know about such things. But your refusal will have to be done on your own. By yourself. Mine was the legally sanctioned task to bring the sculpture to you, and that I have done. My part is over, I am free to go back to Castelaniene where I live.”

  “To Castelaniene?” I repeated, for a split second imagining this young man was returning to the house in St. Ethelberga’s Road.

  “Yes, Castelaniene where I live. The real village, not the stupid suburban house. Don’t you, you poor Martin Bridges, understand who I am? What is the English of my name, Orazio? Horace, you surely agree? And what is the English for my surname, Martello? Hammer—or Fuller, would you not say? When my father made his move to live in the village of Castelaniene
in the country of the Aniene valley that his most admired poet, Horace had once lived in—the poet who loved both women and men—he was adamant that I stayed beside him. He makes a good enough living there, teaching Italians, at school and in their homes, not only the beauties of the English language but the treasures of their own ancestral one, Latin. I, for my part, have done different work, being good with my hands—with my body generally—but never tying myself down to anyone. I labor for Castelaniene itself, and the mountains beyond it, for Nature, for liberty of every kind.”

  Oh, how could it not make sense, little though I might want it to? Besides, the thing had an extraordinary, I might almost say a beautiful, logic to it. The last inhabitant of the Mercy Room had passed away in the company of him for whom the room had originally been designed, as a way of keeping him in his place as a young Englishman. But that scheme had not worked, and never could have done. There was always the antícipo di paradiso waiting, for father and son.

  “Mr. Bridges,” Horace was now saying, “you look so shocked. Forgive me if I add to your condition further, but I have some pages for you which our mutual friend penned with difficulty in his last weeks. When I said to him, ‘What are these?’ he gave an odd sort of smile, and said: ‘Oh, nothing very important. You should bequeath them to Mr. Martin Bridges, along with my capolavoro.’ And he tried to laugh, but the laugh cost him much pain.”