A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Not knowing what direction to take, I suggest that we stop to read the signs. This seems to Catherine rather a tame suggestion. I remember that she has driven across Nepal and give a slight shudder. I have a map, a small map, but unfortunately it covers the whole of Italy and our fifty-mile journey (it turns out to be somewhat longer) is hardly visible. Reading the road signs, which Catherine politely allows me to do, is like deciphering a complicated code, since the directions appear mainly to indicate restaurants. We attract a line of hooting and gesticulating motorists behind us before taking the Salerno road south which, rather unnervingly, is also the road north to Rome. Unfortunately Catherine has made an enemy of the Italian gears. ‘Am I in second or third?’ she shouts to me, and I bend down, still holding my map, to find out. But we successfully reach the autostrada; fling indiscriminate coins at the guard-cashier; then rev up and sail on.

  ‘Where are we now?’ Catherine answers her question decisively. ‘There is Vesuvius!’ she cries, taking both hands off the wheel. But there is no hint of how to reach Ravello and we decide to stop at a motorway station and buy a local map. There is no motorway station. My hand moves frantically across the map of Italy and I occasionally call out a name. ‘NOCHERA IN!’ I cry. Catherine turns to correct my pronunciation. ‘Nocera Inferiore,’ she says. I pretend to take no notice. Eventually we do find a motorway station and Catherine, having overlooked the door, forces her way into and eventually through a closed glass panel. I sit in the car like a dog, like Romney, guarding our luggage, watching helplessly and unhelpfully. Catherine disappears, then returns triumphantly with a map and, after I have studied it, I tell her that we have come too far and must somehow return if we are to avoid touring the south of Italy.

  We charge down the road, come off the autostrada, perform a fabulous U-turn, rejoin the autostrada, fling more coins at the guard, and are on our way again in the opposite direction. Suddenly we see a sign to Ravello, turn and turn again and lose ourselves in a maze of indistinguishable streets. Are we in Agni or Pajani? Catherine murmurs. I say nothing. We ask a girl with a dog: neither of them admits to knowing anything. We head for the mountains, go back, go on, go almost mad. Suddenly there is another signpost to Ravello. We are on course again. But it is a topsy-turvy course. We climb, veering one way, then another, sometimes (it seems to me) on two wheels. Catherine encourages the poor car as if it were Basil, her horse. She is enjoying herself. At one hazardous point she asks me whether I would prefer to be crushed against the rock face or fall to my death into the valley. I choose the rock face. ‘Do keep reminding me’, she reminds me, ‘that they drive on the right in Italy.’ Much of the time we compromise and drive in the middle. I shout out my reminders, clutching, white-knuckled, the side of the door.

  One of the advantages of geared cars, Catherine suggests as she spins the wheel, is that they are narrower than automatic cars and this enables her to whiz through corridors and squeeze past obstacles. Can it be true? She is very game and I feel that we are more at risk from her occasional spasms of doubt than her fierce determination. So I let out extravagant cries of encouragement as we hurtle along. ‘Brilliant!’ I cry as she accidentally sounds the horn. ‘We’ve done it!’ I shout again as we overtake a stationary lorry behind which we have been impatiently waiting in the belief that there is a red light ahead of it. Sometimes I wish there were a red light ahead of us, several red lights. But we continue in good spirits and I notice that Catherine is more confident in the mountains. When I say ‘we go right here’, she answers that it doesn’t matter – and she is correct. From now on all roads lead to Ravello. We enter by an unexpected route, pass unexpectedly through a tunnel, turn unexpectedly left, proceed without much expectation and arrive at a car park where there is some incomprehensible paperwork to complete before we slide into a space and the car, with a final backward lunge (as in The Wages of Fear), almost topples down a precipice.

  We decant the luggage. Though we are high up, we must go higher, much higher. There are some forty steps from the car park to the square in Ravello and then, moving diagonally past the drinkers, children, worshippers, we stagger up and along winding passages, corridors, alleys, mountain pathways, bridges, gangways, kerbs; by churches, houses, restaurants, shrines; and under arches, over stones, sometimes accompanied by music, fading music, fewer people. If this seems exaggerated (and it is), that is because I am toiling with Catherine’s badly behaved baggage, which wants to go downhill fast – particularly down the one hundred and sixty-three steps that lie above the forty we have already conquered. I gasp and pull, pull and gasp, urging Catherine to go ahead and alert the good people of Cimbrone that, like Hannibal, I am approaching. But she will not desert me. So she is witness to my laboured and humiliating progress as I have been witness to her intrepid zigzag motoring. At last we pass through a large wooden portal: the entrance to the Villa Cimbrone.

  The gardens stretch peacefully before us and far below the mirrored sea, with a thin intermittent layer of stationary clouds (or are they islands?) under the hazy sun. To our left is the villa with its courtyards, terraces, cloisters, balconies. This, for the next week, is to be our place of research. The people who visit the gardens each day are now leaving and we make our way against a current of parents and children, courting couples, tourists. Catherine begins talking to one of the Vuilleumier family and we are led through a small courtyard, past a gate and a door marked private and up some stairs to our rooms. Mine is mainly pink and green, Catherine’s blue, and both look down through orange and lemon trees to the bay below.

  We meet the family that evening on one of the terraces and I present a copy of my Lytton Strachey to Giorgio who, since his father’s recent death, has become head of the family, though his mother still lives there and, somewhere deep within the building, I believe, her mother too. I am handing over my book partly to establish my credentials as a ‘gentleman-scholar’, and partly to make a link with the Villa Cimbrone, Catherine having shown me beforehand a brochure with its claims to be a regular meeting place for the Bloomsbury Group. I take out my pen and on the title page write ‘at the Villa Cimbrone’, signing my name – this is my passport to speak on Strachey here seven years later when I will meet Violet Trefusis’s young admirer, the mysterious Tiziana. My book is admired from a distance by the family. They surround it with amiable gestures and sounds, though not liking to approach too close. I hope this will encourage the habit of giving during our negotiations. We are to hold our first formal meeting the next morning.

  Catherine and I then descend the one hundred and sixty-three steps along the alleys and passages, and ask an old gentleman which restaurant he would recommend. He points to one, raising his fingers to his lips to convey the deliciousness of the food.

  Catherine does not want to talk about the next day’s meeting and I see that she is worried by the prospect. So we talk a bit about ourselves. ‘I am more interested in him than he is in me,’ she notes in a journal she kept of our travels. But this is not quite true. In Yorkshire I was continually questioning her and think she needs a rest from this bombardment. But Catherine interprets this as being due to something lacking in herself. I do not understand this until she later gives me her journal to read. She is someone of immense courage and dash on the outside, and much uncertainty within. It is to address this imbalance that she is here.

  We walk back up to the villa, stopping to look at the lights in the valley. It is quite cold. We come to the great wooden door – it is bolted, so we press every bell we can find. Alfonso, a very amiable man of all trades with a hefty moustache, lets us in and says he will bring us both breakfast in the morning. Since the Villa Cimbrone is not yet open as a hotel we had not expected breakfast; we decide to eat together on Catherine’s balcony at 8.30 and discuss tactics before beginning our negotiations.

  I wake at 7 a.m. and look around. It is a misty morning but the room is bright and pretty. There are tiled floors, enormous chunks of furniture and a brilliantly white modern bat
hroom. Just before 8.30 I knock at Catherine’s door. It is her birthday, which ‘I would be glad to forget’ she says. The room is full of cards people gave her before she left. Birthdays are a symbol of what worries her, but these happy cards seem a promising sign. We go on to her balcony overlooking the sea – a wonderful, dreamlike view. As we stand there, Alfonso opens some shutters further off and appears at a window to our right. Catherine shouts a greeting to him and he disappears. Ten minutes later he is at the door with our breakfast as he will be every morning: good strong coffee, delicious croissants, jams, honey and marmalade.

  Over breakfast Catherine says she will be angry if the family insist on holding on to Lucille’s family papers. They were left accidentally and, except for those that specifically refer to the Villa Cimbrone, should be returned to England. I say that we should set an example by giving the family whatever photocopies we have that might be of genuine interest to them. For instance, I have brought a copy of Ernest Beckett’s Will and would be happy for them to have it since there are many references to the Villa Cimbrone in it. I will ask them about Beckett’s companion Florence Green and her house at Castro Leone. And if they have any Beckett letters I will ask for photocopies.

  Before the negotiations begin we make our way along the belvedere, passing its line of battered Roman statues as if inspecting a parade of wounded soldiers. Then we explore the layers below, descending every so often a flight of stone steps with wooden banisters from one level of the garden to another. The sun has now emerged through the mist, making trembling patterns on the ground as its light penetrates the trees. Many of these trees and plants come from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. There are cypresses, junipers, yews, an azalea walk, hydrangeas. From the deep valley and hills come distant echoes of people working. Every so often we turn a corner and come across some Beckett eccentricity, my favourite being a naked statue of a rather plump biblical Eve reclining in a dark grotto. This was possibly made in Rome, I like to think, by Waldo Story with the voluptuous José as his model. When D. H. Lawrence came on this same walk with Earl Brewster in 1927, he also walked through these woods, past pools where irises grew, and, seeing this grotto with its life-size marble statue, remarked that she was ‘too pale’ and needed ‘a touch of colour’. Snatching up a handful of dark brown earth he began energetically rubbing it on Eve’s face and then, liking the effect, gave her ‘a complete mud-bath’ transforming her into ‘a black lady’. Since Lawrence’s act of vandalism, iron bars have been fixed to the entrance of this grotto excluding Eve from Ernest’s Eden and, effectively, imprisoning her.

  We go back to the library where we have arranged to meet Giorgio. There are two or three hundred books here from the Grimthorpe days – English, Italian and many French classics, mostly in collected editions, well-bound, untouched. On a circular table at the centre of the room a few modern novels have been left by guests. Giorgio arrives, we go through double doors on to a large patio and begin our discussion.

  I show him Ernest’s Will, read out very slowly the parts mentioning the Villa Cimbrone, and ask him about Castro Leone and Florence Green. He has never heard of either and refers us to a local historian in Ravello who might know something. I then hand the Will to him expecting him to keep it but he goes and makes a photocopy of it. The hum of his photocopying machine becomes a familiar sound over the next few days. He also shows us some white envelopes, which contain press cuttings from the Yorkshire Post, The Times and the Morning Post during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – mostly reports of Ernest’s speeches during general elections. I read while Catherine talks of the Grimthorpes’ lives. I fear that talking about the careers of these Yorkshire bankers and Members of Parliament is out of place and a waste of time. But I am wrong. There is nothing Giorgio likes to hear about more than the lives of the English aristocracy. It is as if, having taken over the house early in the 1960s, the two families have been miraculously entwined. Giorgio values all these brittle, yellow press cuttings, these notices of weddings and deaths, these reports of election results in a far-off country, not for their commercial value or even their content, but simply as evidence of their connection. The very sound of these aristocratic names is music to him. He wants to hear more; he wants to hear again what he has already heard. He is spellbound by what, in her wonderful Yorkshire-Italian, Catherine tells him.

  He asks why, if the family did not want this material to become part of the Cimbrone estate, did they leave it here? There is so much: books, furniture, and these papers – it cannot be wholly accidental. And why, after such a long time, are we coming to ask for it? I answer that there is a difference between furniture and papers. Furniture is part of a house – the transportation of such substantial stuff is impractical. They must treat these tables and chairs and even the books in their bookcases as a legitimate bonus. But papers left in cupboards and chests of drawers are essentially different. They are so easily left by mistake. Have we not all done something like this one time or another? I explain that, while writing my memoirs, I had returned to my grandparents’ house where I grew up and was shown by the owners books I had read as a child, also my father’s ‘Book of Lights’, which were designs for Lalique glass lights from the 1920s and 1930s, and my great-grandmother’s ‘Book of Ferns’, a vast calf-bound volume arranged and pressed by her while in India during the 1870s. All these had been found behind a curtain in an attic by the people who bought the house after my family left. The new owner, who was something of a horticulturalist, had grown especially fond of the ‘Book of Ferns’ but let me take it away, together with the other books. It was not an easy decision for him, but he acted with generosity, recognising that they were accidentally left there and rightfully belong to me. Catherine, I say, is looking for the same generosity and sense of justice. In return she promises to let them have anything she finds in England that ought to have its proper home in Italy. That, in short, is our case. Our difficulty is that we don’t know what there is at Cimbrone – and nor, I come to suspect, does Giorgio.

  Our meeting goes on until the early afternoon when I am introduced to Giorgio’s mother, a small, sturdy, smiling woman in her late fifties with short-cut auburn hair, who greets Catherine warmly as ‘one of the family’. We are to resume our talks in the evening after a late lunch in Ravello and a siesta. This was to be the pattern of our work, a pattern sometimes varied at short notice.

  One afternoon when there is a pause in our work on the patio, we meet the local historian. He is sympathetic but cannot help us over Castro Leone, though he is at work on some bulky papers and will contact us if he comes across anything this year, next year, some time …

  Another day we have lunch with Gore Vidal. He lives on the promontory below and beyond the Villa Cimbrone in a spacious and fantastical cliff dwelling cut into the precipitous rocks and perilously clinging to them. Poised above the sea, it is set over several acres of descending terraces where grapes, olives and lemons grow among the cypress trees and umbrella pines. Visiting writers have likened it to Prospero’s kingdom, though it reminds another visitor this year, the American novelist Erica Jong, of Hitler’s eagle’s nest at Berchtesgaden. But it has a gentler name, La Rondinaia (the swallow’s nest) and was built for Lucille (who, Gore says, still haunts the place). And probably this land, it occurs to me, was once called the Castro Leone and is the place where Florence Green was intended to have her villa. Everyone had told the architect who built this spectacular house that it would quickly become detached from the cliff face, tumble down the mountain and with a great splash enter the sea. So Lucille procured some dynamite, which she exploded in a cave below the house: and behold, the house still stood. It was, everyone agreed, a miracle.

  Lucille was a believer in miracles. Travelling down Oxford Street in London one day in deep despair on the top of a bus, she was visited by a revelation, which she set out to elucidate in two books, Unbound Worlds (1955) and Neti. Neti (Not This. Not That, 1959). In these books she sought
her own ‘theory of everything’. Mixing philosophy with astrophysics, adding a portion of ancient and modern religious dogma, some measure of infinity, a sprinkling of quotations from Jung, the Buddha and the astronomer Fred Hoyle, she concocted a terrific brew to keep despair at bay. La Rondinaia, which defied all pessimistic predictions, is a temple to her faith.

  As with many religions, the path to this temple is not easy. The true pathway begins at a gate at the back of a hotel in Ravello, a gate with a bell, which one must ring to gain entry to the vertiginous path. There are other gates with bells along the way. We ring them and we hear the voice of Howard Austen, Gore Vidal’s guard and companion, instructing us to keep to the strait and narrow mountain path. We pass through the last gate, enter the garden where two lion-like cats patrol the grounds, and are guided by Howard to the house where Gore greets us with glasses of champagne.