Restoration

by Olaf Olafsson

  She stayed awake until late, pacing. The room that she rented was in a flat a stone’s throw from the studio. The owner, an elderly gentleman, was never there, spending most of his time with his daughter in Florence. The rent was low in return for her watering his flowers and cleaning every other week. Dust sheets covered the heavy furniture in the living room and dining room, where the curtains were drawn. She was happy in the flat but did not spend much time there, often working late and starting early. She rarely cooked for herself, generally eating supper in a nearby canteen, run by a husband and wife.

  Eventually she fell asleep but her rest was fitful and Flora appeared before her again and again, smiling and saying that Kristín must come and visit soon. She said nothing in these fragmentary dreams except what she had said when they met, word for word, with a cheerful expression.

  “Robert, don’t be silly. She’s not a child,” her eyes on Kristín as she spoke.

  Kristín had liked her. No, that wasn’t the right word; the feeling had been stronger. When she sat in the semidarkness of her room that evening, she came to the conclusion that she felt warmth toward Marshall’s wife. It was a strange thing to feel, but she was forced to acknowledge it. She had always been impressionable, but down-to-earth at the same time, never one to let her emotions lead her astray. She had no desire to hurt this woman whose manner to her had been friendly, sincere, benevolent. It might have been easier if she’d been arrogant and supercilious.

  She tried to guess what had passed between the couple after they had said good-bye to her and continued up the street.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her?” she imagined Flora asking. “All alone in a new city far from home, knowing no one. We must take the first opportunity to invite her over.”

  In her imagination he did not answer, merely nodded and changed the subject.

  When they met the following morning, he did not refer to their encounter the evening before. He did not arrive at the studio until nearly midday, nor did he stay long. He rarely did, spending more time, when not on business trips, in his office on the floor below with Signorina Pirandello, his secretary. Since Kristín started work at the studio, there had been just the two of them, she and Signor Rosselli, a middle-aged man who had worked for Marshall part-time for a few years.

  Signor Rosselli seemed suspicious on Kristín’s first morning at the studio, but his attitude improved when he discovered that she had no experience and was expected only to assist him. He was a gaunt, seemingly high-strung little man, and Kristín was immediately aware of the care Marshall took not to offend him. He praised him regularly, stressing the fact that the studio was his domain. Yet at times it was as if Marshall itched to intervene as he watched Rosselli working, as if he had to restrain himself from taking charge.

  Initially, Kristín’s duty had been to tidy up the studio, go through the pictures awaiting restoration, make sure they were all catalogued, and write a short description of their condition. Some of the paintings were in appalling shape, others required nothing more than cleaning and reframing. Marshall lent her numerous books on restoration and conservation and, being conscientious by nature and eager for his approval, she immersed herself in them, reading into the early hours. She learnt about the effects of time on wood and canvas, paint, glue, and varnish; about the impact of moisture, heat and light, insects, soot, and other kinds of grime. She read about renowned conservators like Madame Helfer in Paris, who worked for the famous dealer William Suhr, as well as reports about paintings that had been saved from oblivion and others that had been ruined by amateur restorers. It surprised her how many great paintings had been touched by hands other than their author’s, how extensive these restorations often seemed, and she couldn’t help but wonder about the authenticity of some of these works.

  She also read articles and features about her master. He did not give them to her himself but there were references to them in the books he had lent her. Later she asked herself if he had assumed that she would search them out. She went to the library at the American Academy on the Janiculum Hill, where she sat for a long time, reading everything she could find about him. An article in the London Times claimed that American and British millionaires would not buy a Renaissance painting unless either Robert Marshall or Bernard Berenson had given it his blessing, established the identity of the artist, and removed all doubt of its authenticity. Marshall’s expertise was unquestioned, according to the Times, and unrivaled, except possibly by Berenson, who had devoted decades to compiling a register of every Italian Renaissance painting held in a museum or private collection. This register was considered the most reliable record of the works, and several books and journals that Kristín had read described his working methods in admiring detail.

  Marshall and Berenson were trusted as disinterested scholars. Several newspaper articles also mentioned that Marshall acted as a consultant to well-known dealers, such as Duveen before they fell out, Colnaghi in London and Wildenstein in New York. The Times referred in passing to his dispute with Duveen without going into any detail, and she could find no mention of it anywhere else. The article also implied that the dealers paid Marshall a commission, although no more was said of that, the emphasis being on his almost unmatched restoration skills.

  There were numerous pictures of him, both alone and in company—with Duveen, Berenson, who was described as his rival, and Flora. Kristín dwelled longest on the photograph of the couple. It was not recent and appeared to have been taken in the studio. There was a painting by Giorgione on the easel behind them; Marshall was looking directly at the camera, Flora’s eyes were on him. They were both smiling.

  Kristín was helping Signor Rosselli remove a small painting by Titian from its stretcher and transfer it to an iron table when Marshall appeared in the doorway. The picture was in a bad state of repair; the paint was flaking and had broken off in places. The white pigment had yellowed where it could be glimpsed under the surface dirt. They were holding the picture between them, laying it down carefully before turning on the heating element in the tabletop. Signor Rosselli’s hands were shaking. Kristín had noticed that he drank quite a bit.

  Marshall was wearing a light coat, having come straight in without visiting his office first. It was as if he had been in a hurry to see them, yet he said nothing when he appeared at the door, merely watched in silence as they laid the Titian on the table. Rosselli grew nervous as always when the master turned up. Instead of fixing the canvas on the table, he looked in silence toward the door, waiting for Marshall to speak.

  The master did not oblige, but walked over to the table and inspected the picture. Rosselli’s eyes shifted between him and the work.

  “Berenson claims it’s not a Titian but a Giorgione,” Marshall said finally. “Not for the first time. One would have thought he’d have learnt from his mistakes by now.”

  He continued to study the picture without moving, his face impassive.

  “It’s not every day you get your hands on a Titian, Piero,” he said.

  Rosselli’s voice was unsteady as he answered, “No, but it’s not the first time either.”

  Marshall gave a private smile.

  “Pass me a magnifying glass, would you?”

  Rosselli went to his desk at the back of the studio and opened the top drawer. Marshall raised his eyes and said quietly to Kristín, “You must keep an eye on him and let me know if he does anything stupid.”

  She was startled. She didn’t say anything but nodded, perhaps a little too eagerly. He came closer to her, gently touching the small of her back on his way out.

  When Rosselli returned with the magnifying glass, he was already gone.

  KRISTÍN USED TO GET UP AT DAWN AND GO FOR walks before the city awakened. Some days she went down to the Tiber, on others over the Ponte Margherita toward the Vatican, but more often south, into the old part of the city. There she would seat herself by an empty square or on a bench in a small garden and watch the fog lifting and the waiters
opening the cafés, rubbing their eyes, spreading white cloths on the tables. She admired the cobbled streets and the magnificent edifices, the statues that came to life as they caught the morning sun. During the first months of working for Robert Marshall she generally took a pen and sketchpad along with her and drew whatever met her eye, but she eventually left the pad at home. It wasn’t deliberate, but her mind was now wholly preoccupied by the pictures that awaited her in the studio. For the first few months she only assisted Signor Rosselli with relatively simple tasks, performing them all with precision. She was resourceful and a quick study.

  The first time Rosselli gave her a free hand, he ordered her to clean the back of a fairly unremarkable painting by loosening the stretcher and wiping away the dirt that had collected between the stretcher and the canvas and begun to damage the picture, and then to brush the dust off the canvas with a feather and fix the frayed threads. He did not let her touch the picture surface until later, and then only to clean it; he himself saw to the repairs and insisted on being left completely alone when it came to wetting the brush and filling in the gaps. He was always on edge when there was a lot at stake; his hands had a tendency to shake and beads of sweat would form on his forehead. He didn’t like her to watch, and would send her out, often on some pointless errand. She learnt to behave as if she were taking no notice, and would focus instead on her duties, however dull they seemed in comparison to his work. If Marshall turned up, Rosselli would stop working and wait for him to leave.

  As the winter passed, Signor Rosselli’s drinking became more serious. He kept a bottle in a locked drawer in his desk, and would use it either for Dutch courage or to reward himself for a job well done. By February there would be two or three occasions a week when he did not turn up for work in the morning. When he did finally appear at midday or later, he drifted around the studio like a ghost or sat at his desk, staring into space. Kristín used the opportunity to take over his work because he was too lethargic to forbid her, too depressed to give thought to her chores, which she sensed must be insignificant in comparison with his own private demons.

  “Signor Rosselli,” she would say at such times, “would it be all right if I carried on with what you were doing yesterday? Sewing. Making a new stretcher. Cleaning. Gluing. Patching . . .”

  He did not have the strength to drink for two days in a row, so he would turn up the following morning as if nothing had happened, continuing the work where it had been left off. He never commented on Kristín’s contribution, neither criticizing nor praising it. She did not refer to it either, merely stepped back and assisted him as required.

  One day toward evening, after Rosselli had gone home early, Marshall appeared unexpectedly at the studio. He had been away on business for the last week. She did not hear him enter, and was not aware of him until he was standing behind her. This time she was not startled, but stopped working and lifted her hands from the table.

  He said nothing at first, merely examined the painting. It was a work by a little-known sixteenth-century artist, Virgin and Child with Musical Angels. She had cleaned the back and had just begun to loosen a patch that was distorting the canvas. She had dealt with this kind of damage before; when the glue pulled at the threads in the canvas, cracks would form in the picture and the paint would eventually flake off.

  He touched her hand in silence, taking the fine cutting blade from her and poking it carefully into the patch that she had begun to loosen. He freed a few threads, moistened his right index finger on his lip and used it to lift the dried crumbs of glue from the canvas. After examining them for a moment, he raised his finger to his mouth and bit the crumbs with his front teeth.

  “Wheat glue,” he said. “Always trouble. What’s more, the patch is not made from the right material. It’s fine. The canvas is coarse. The patch needs to be similar to the canvas, preferably identical.”

  She nodded.

  “Is he hungover today?”

  The question took her by surprise.

  “He’s gone home,” she said.

  “You can’t protect him,” he said, “no one can. Not I, not even he, because he can’t help himself. He’s an assistant by nature and can’t stand the pressure that comes from being in charge. That’s true of many—perhaps most—people, but it’s not an easy thing to face up to. The pawn aspires to be a knight, the knight a rook, the rook a king. His ambition has brought him nothing but misery.”

  Falling silent, he walked over to the window and watched the last rays of the sun catching the rooftops across the street.

  “It’s essential to know your own limitations, Kristín, and be satisfied with your lot—whatever that is, because no job is without value. We’re all guided by providence.”

  He turned from the window and studied her as she stood by the worktable.

  “Take you, for example. You know you’re more talented than your boss. You can tell. You’ve probably known it from the first day, although you’ve never said as much, not even to yourself. You’ve performed every task impeccably but you want more. He’s holding you back, standing in your way. You watch him work and sense his failings. Even though you don’t yet know all the techniques, you still know that you could do better. A strange feeling, isn’t it? This certainty—and the power that goes with it. You watch and wait, because you know your time will come. And little by little he cracks, becoming ever more despairing; his drinking gets worse, he loses his grip on his work. You seize the chance to offer your services. He accepts—in silence, I suspect—because he has no other choice. And your motives are pure. No one could accuse you of anything else. It’s not your fault that he has overreached himself. You’re doing him a favor. And providence is doing the same for you.”

  No one had ever spoken to her like that before. She couldn’t respond but sensed that he did not expect an answer.

  He walked toward the door, stopping halfway.

  “Are you still drawing?” he asked.

  She hesitated.

  “Not as much lately,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  He left. She stood still, unable to understand why she suddenly felt crushed.

  “ . . . KRISTÍN JÓNSDÓTTIR HAS GRADUATED FROM the Royal Academy with a favorable report. She has mastered composition and the handling of color and light, has a good sense of form and a firm grasp of anatomy. She understands perspective and ambience, and possesses the patience that is such a necessary quality for those who practice art . . .

  “However, it is above all in the technical area that Kristín excels. Her technique is almost faultless, and the present writer, who has taught at this institution for well-nigh thirty years, cannot remember a single student who possessed such a strong feel for materials and their processing as Kristín . . .

  “As regards her capacity for originality, time will tell where Kristín’s requirements and talents lie. At present her strength appears to be principally in the area of technique and dexterity, although it should be noted that her graduation picture of an Icelandic landscape was both outstanding and unexpected, in terms of composition and the handling of color and light—the radiance from the glacier lending the barren waste an aura of tranquil sanctity. It is to be hoped that the talent Kristín evinces in this picture is a sign that she is maturing from a first-rate technician into a promising artist . . .”

  She folds up the report and lays it aside. The document shows signs of having been read often, sometimes daily, sometimes many times a day. She has come within an inch of throwing it away but has never been able to take the irrevocable step. Sometimes she tries to convince herself that she is seeking encouragement from it, but she does not succeed. Reading it never makes her happy.

  “ . . . a sign that she is maturing from a first-rate technician into a promising artist . . .”

  Jensen was well disposed toward her, had been from the first day. He was warm and friendly to his students, and actually seemed relieved when she ha
nded in her graduation piece, an oil painting of the Vatnajökull glacier.

  “This is good,” he had said, “this is . . . very good. Kristín, you’ve taken me by surprise. This is a real improvement. To tell the truth, I was beginning to think you didn’t have it in you . . .”

  She listened in silence and when her reaction was not what he had expected, he patted her shoulder and said, “I didn’t mean to offend you but I wasn’t expecting this. The radiance from the glacier, Kristín; it comes from within.”

  What she had meant to paint was the picture that she has been carrying around in her head ever since she was a child. It’s of a swan, raising itself in flight from a small pond. It is early winter, the grass has withered. The swan leaves its reflection behind in the pond for a little girl who has run down the slope and is now wading into the water to catch it. She is wearing a yellow dress and has just emerged from the church on the hill. The church is not visible in the picture. Nor is the funeral procession that has stopped and is looking from the girl to her mother who is dressed in black like the six men bearing the coffin. She calls after the girl who hears nothing but the distant echo of her father’s voice saying, “You must show reverence for God’s creation, Kristín dear, for the fishes and birds, the mountains and winds. The waves on the sea . . .”

  She can hear nothing else as she snatches up the skirt of her dress and wades into the water. Can see nothing but the reflection, neither the people outside the church nor her mother on her way down the slope nor the horses grazing on the faded grass under the darkening sky. Can smell nothing but the meadowsweet that she had meant to give her father when he returned to land.