There’s no need to tell you that his death destroyed me. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of telling you exactly how it affected me, but let’s just say I was never the same again. Of course, after I discovered what had happened I couldn’t publish the book. In fact, I couldn’t stand the sight of it, so I burnt it. As I watchedthe pages disappear into the flames and turn to ash I felt a sense of purging, a punishment, if you like. Subsequently, I found I couldn’t write a thing. Not a word. That’s what guilt does, you see, as you may soon find out yourself.
Now I’m afraid you’ve got to do a little more work if you want to find the manuscript that you are looking for. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind. Think about it.
Yours,
Gordon Crace
The note fell from my hands onto the floor. I felt weak, drained of energy, near to fainting. The bastard, the fucking bastard. Feeling the rage rise within me, I stretched out my arm and pulled off the pictures from the walls of the portego, smashing the glass of the etchings and breaking the frames. I stumbled into the drawing room and threw a table light into the mirror above the fireplace. I saw myself shattered into a thousand pieces. I picked up one of the books lying on the floor and tore it apart, sending the pages flying into the air. I wrenched an oil painting from the wall and punched my hand through its canvas. I moved into the kitchen and turned over the table and threw a chair against the window. As the glass cracked, I felt the wind from outside whip around the room. I hobbled across the portego into Crace’s bedroom. I pulled down the curtains from his bed, knocked over his bedside table and ripped apart his pillows, sending feathers cascading through the air. I couldn’t bear to see the Madonna looking so serenely down at me. I forced the painting down from the wall and smashed it over my knee.
By the time I reached the study, I was exhausted, my anger almost spent. I saw Crace’s pathetic form lying on the floor, and although I wanted to beat him into a pulp, I felt tears running down my face. I dropped to my knees and sobbed over his body, images and snatches of conversation from our months together playing through my mind. I’m not sure how long I stayed there by his corpse, but as I came to my senses one question continued to worm its way through my mind. If he really had destroyed The Music Teacher, what manuscript was he talking about? Also, I couldn’t forget the last line of Crace’s note. Was he referring to my own situation with Eliza or the fictional one I had created and read to him? Was Crace telling me to look for the answer to the clue inside my own notebook?
Wiping the tears from my eyes, I dragged myself out of the study and back to my bedroom. I picked up my journal, feeling sick at the sight of it, despising every word I had written. I resisted the urge to tear out every page and flicked to the entries where I had written about my relationship with Eliza and then to the sketch about Richard and his growing obsession with his ex-girlfriend, Emma. I read through the accounts, the one real, the other fictional, but I couldn’t find anything. What a waste of fucking time the whole thing had been! But just as I was about to throw the notebook across the room, I remembered something Crace had said to me. I turned the pages back to the beginning of the journal, where I had written about tricking Crace into giving me the key to the letter box. As we had walked down to the courtyard, he had gestured toward the cupid that stood on the top of the Corinthian column and said that comment about how love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.
I pushed myself upward and out down the corridor. I weaved my way past the shards of glass, the broken canvases and the splintered frames and through the portego to the top of the stairs. I stepped outside into the rain, the night sky still illuminated by flashes of lightning. I eased myself down the stairs, using the metal banister as a support, and toward the statue. Attached to its head by a large elastic band was a plastic bag. I saw an image of Lavinia, her head bloodied. I was back there, on that dark night. I had just killed her, the feel of the rock smashing into her head still fresh in the memory of my skin. I had placed the bag over her head so as not to get the blood on my clothes. I had turned around, but when I looked back, shining the torch in her direction, her lips were still moving underneath the surface of the plastic, making a series of silent, unknowable words.
I stood there in the courtyard, letting the rain wash down my face and over my body, stinging the scratches that covered my skin. I hoped the water would cleanse me of my sins, help me forget the past. It didn’t. I grabbed the package, snapping the elastic band, and made my way back up the stairs into the portego. Even though I was soaking, I didn’t wait to dry myself. I tore through the bag to find another envelope. I took out the short note, now splattered with drops of water from my hands and face, and read it.
Dear Adam,
My, you were observant, weren’t you? Did you write down everything I said? I feel honored you found me of such interest. I hope I haven’t disappointed you in any way.
Now, just one last thing before I leave you to your thoughts. You’ll find a copy of the book hidden on my corpse. It will be nice for me to think of you touching me even after my death. And you never know—you may actually find that you enjoy it.
Contrary to what you might think, I have been quite busy. I did most of the writing at night in bed, scribbling away in an old notebook. The copying out was rather a bore, and I only just managed to finish it. But I didn’t want to leave without providing you with a little reading matter; after all, where I suspect you are going, you might need something to alleviate the boredom.
Hopefully the material is so strong that my publishers won’t mind the primitive method of presentation. I gave the book to Lucia to post when you were out. So, you see, she did come in useful after all.
I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done. Your help has been invaluable. I think you’ll find you make a fascinating character.
Good-bye,
Gordon Crace
I let the letter drop onto the floor and ran back to the study. As I turned into the corridor, I slipped. I looked down at my foot. The blood from my wound had soaked through the towel, which was now a mass of red. I raised myself upward, screaming and cursing, leaving a bloody snail-like trail behind me.
Yet the pain from my foot was nothing compared to the sense of panic inside, a plague of locusts trapped in my ribcage. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were drowning. I felt like I was going to swallow my tongue.
Crace’s lizard eyes stared blankly out of his ghastly white face, his thin lips curved into a slight smile as if he were determined to have the last laugh. Feeling repelled by the idea of searching his dead body for the book, I steadied myself by the chest. But then my legs gave way and I collapsed by Crace. Underneath me I felt the sticky viscosity of his darkening blood clinging to my skin. Closing my eyes, I pressed my hands down onto his nightshirt and began to feel his skeletal corpse for any signs of the hidden manuscript. The blood from his wound stained my palms and, as I searched, I left another trail across him. Slipping my hands underneath his slight frame, I turned him over and repeated the process on the back of his body, feeling the sharp bones jutting out of his thin, cold skin. As I traced my fingers down toward the bottom of his spine, I felt something hard and rectangular under his nightshirt. I pushed my hand under the fabric.
Pulling back the nightshirt, I saw a black, cloth-bound book strapped to the base of his back. I pulled the elastic, snapping it. Here was the lost manuscript that I had been looking for. I turned to the first page where the words The Lying Tongue had been written in Crace’s spidery handwriting. As I started to read, spots of blood from my hands dropped onto the paper. A terrible fear gripped me. Its main character was called Adam. It was my story. They were my words.
Acknowledgment
I could not have written this book without the support and love of those around me, especially my parents and family. Thanks, too, must go to my ever enthusiastic agent and friend, Clare Alexander, whose insight and judgment is second to none, and to all the staff at Gillon Aitke
n, in particular Sally Riley, Lesley Thorne and Justin Gowers.
I would like to thank the whole team at Canongate Books in the United Kingdom, especially my wonderful editor Dan Franklin, and first class publisher Jamie Byng. In the United States I owe a great deal to everyone at Atria Books and Simon & Schuster, in particular to my editor Peter Borland and his assistant Nick Simonds, designer Jaime Putorti and publisher Judith Curr.
Thanks to Gavanndra Hodge, who read an early draft of this novel, and to Christopher Fletcher, Susan Shaw, Peter Parker, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Mary Greene, Victoria Millar, Mike Jones, Frances Wilson, Christopher Stocks, Charles Darwent, Salvatore Grigoli and Ewa Gizowska. Thank you, too, to Marcus Field—you know how much you mean to me.
This is a work of the imagination, but a number of sources have proved invaluable, including:
K. Andrews. Catalogue of Italian Drawings, two volumes. Cambridge: National Gallery of Scotland, 1968.
P. Aretino. Selected Letters, tr. George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1976.
B. Berenson. The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, 3rd ed. London: 1907.
M. Garrett. Traveller’s Literary Companion to Italy. Brighton: In Print Pub., 1998.
M. Garrett. Venice: A Cultural and Literary Companion. Oxford: Signal Books, 2001.
M. Grundy. Venice: An Anthology Guide. London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1980.
P. Humfrey, T. Clifford, A. Weston-Lewis and M. Bury. The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2004.
G. Mazzariol and A. Dorigato. Venetian Palazzi. Cologne: Ever-green/Benedict Taschen Verlag, 1998.
J. Newman and N. Pevsner. The Buildings of England: Dorset. London: Penguin Books, 1972.
B. Skinner, Andrew Wilson and the Hopetoun Collection, Country Life, 15 August 1968, pp. 370–372.
J. Steer. Venetian Painting. London: Thames and Hudson, 1907, reprinted 1970.
G. Vasari. The Lives of the Artists, tr. George Bull. Penguin, 1971.
The Lying Tongue Page 28