‘Isn’t it very odd,’ she asked, ‘to stick horses on a church?’
‘It must be something to do with their religion.’
‘I don’t see why – not even for Catholics. Jesus travelled by donkey as a baby, and on an ass, which I suppose is the same thing, later on.’ Kirstie had been well brought up. ‘But I don’t remember that he ever had anything to do with horses.’
‘They’re good horses.’ Gloria shifted, as it were, the angle of appraisal. ‘And they must be nearly twenty hands.’
The four superb creatures on the loggia were certainly that, for proportions and perspectives are tricky before such a scene. And even from this distance their noble bronze glinted with residual gold. Mounted on them – Gloria suddenly thought – there ought to be four splendid young men.
‘Read about them,’ Kirstie said. She was a conscientious girl.
‘Greek work of the time of Alexander.’ Gloria had obediently rummaged in her guide. ‘Possibly from the Rhodian Chariot of the Sun at Delphi.’ Gloria looked up. ‘What does yours say?’ she demanded. Scepticism had been growing in her over matters of this sort.
‘Oh, very well.’ Kirstie too had a book: one devoted entirely to this unmanageable city. She consulted the index and turned to the appropriate page. ‘Made in Imperial Rome,’ she presently announced, ‘and later sent to Constantinople. And—do you know?—it says they’re loot. Pretty cool, putting loot on a church. They ought to be in a museum, if you ask me.’
‘Or sent back to Constantinople.’ Gloria fell silent. Perhaps the fontana minore, she was thinking, ought to be sent back to Viterbo.
Quite soon – if unbelievably – it was going to turn chilly. The fact would not be acknowledged in their pensione. And you have to go to rather a grand hotel in Italy before finding anywhere much in which to sit comfortably around. Undeniably, an awkwardly long evening stretched before them.
‘Do you think there’s a cinema?’ Gloria asked.
‘Of course there must be cinemas. It stands to reason.’
‘I haven’t seen any. But look in your paper. That ought to tell.’
Not without alacrity, Kirstie embarked on this alternative line of research. Sure enough, Venice – throned on her hundred isles – did have cinemas. There were at least half a dozen of them.
‘L’Assassino di Rillington Place: Numero Died,’ Kirstie read. ‘How about that?’
‘I don’t think so.’ They hadn’t come nine hundred miles, Gloria felt, to plunge into London affairs not wholly remote from the professional experience of either. ‘Isn’t there something about Italians?’
‘I Licenziosi Desideri,’ Kirstie read slowly and laboriously, ‘Di una Ragazza Moderna con il Complesso della Verginita. I’ve no doubt that’s about Italians. And pretty permissive, if your taste lies that way.’
‘It doesn’t. Try again.’
‘II Prigionero di Zenda.’
‘That’s it! We’ve got the book at home.’
‘In Italian?’ Kirstie, having heard about the mysteries of Nudd, wasn’t surprised.
‘Of course not. It’s an English book. The Prisoner of Zenda, by a man called Anthony Hope. When I read it as a kid, I thought it absolutely fab.’
‘We’ll go to that.’ Kirstie put down her paper, and was then struck by a sudden thought. ‘But I say! Do you think that in Italy girls go to cinemas and places of that sort without an escort?’
‘What utter rot!’ Gloria was astonished by this positively medieval question. ‘You don’t imagine we can’t look after ourselves? And I didn’t notice you much minding when those sailors whistled at us down there on the Riva.’
‘They were rather nice sailors.’
‘Well, perhaps the young males at the cinema will be rather nice too. And, even if the worst comes to the worst, it won’t do you much harm to have your bottom pinched. It can happen in London on the Underground.’ Gloria offered these flippant remarks because she was really rather startled. Kirstie Anderson was several years older than she was and to be presumed rich in worldly wisdom.
‘It’s just a thought,’ Kirstie said. ‘Perhaps one of those ancient American women in the pensione—’
‘Excuse me,’ a voice said from the next table. ‘It’s frightful cheek to butt in. But would it be too absolutely shocking and improper if I asked whether I might come along?’
They stared at the young Englishman who had made this incredible speech. He had been listening to their conversation – and as at least a scrap of it had been what is conventionally called indelicate he hadn’t chosen too tactful a moment for announcing the fact. On the other hand, his boldness had something attractive about it. It wasn’t boldness in the sense in which the word can mean assurance or impudence. He was looking at once lively and alarmed. It was evident that they had only to utter a word – or not utter a word – and he would acknowledge his outrageousness and bolt.
‘It’s very kind of you to have taken an interest in us,’ Kirstie said drily.
‘I’m terribly sorry!’ Thus mildly rebuked, the young man blushed. This was definitely engaging. Nobody can turn on a blush – as they can turn on, say, a stammer or an appropriate sort of laugh. A blush – at least if it is only a faint blush or flush – is a perfectly manly thing, and seems to witness to ingenuousness of intention. ‘Forget it,’ the young man said. ‘Or—dash it!—no. Consider it, give it a chance, for just a moment. It’s not absolutely awful. I’m a perfectly respectable character. I’m in the perfectly respectable pensione next to yours. I noticed you going out this morning.’
If Gloria felt this was a little too much fuss she hardly registered it. She was thinking that very faintly in her head the young man rang a bell. Had she noticed him lying in bed as she trundled her tea-trolley through a ward? It seemed improbable. He did have ‘London’ somehow written all over him, but he didn’t have written all over him what was still sometimes called ‘hospital class’. She certainly hadn’t seen him on a rugger field; he wasn’t the type that plays for Blackheath or has ever collected an important Cap or a Blue. Perhaps she’d glimpsed him on television, talking about polyphonic music or the future of the pound sterling. It could only have been a glimpse, since she always turned that sort of programme off. In any case, she wasn’t going to make a talking point of the thing now.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘And we’ll meet outside the cinema just before the film starts.’ However right Kirstie was about escorts, she was herself determined absolutely to decline the need for one while walking through Venice of an early evening.
‘That will be most—’
‘Oh, look! Somebody’s climbed on one of the horses.’
This was Kirstie’s interruption, perhaps made merely from an impulse to create a diversion: she had to take in the new situation. But there could be no doubt about the horse. The great bronze creature now had a rider. High above the Piazza though he was, he could be distinguished as a young man of the wandering, long-haired sort – but even with a leg-up from a friend he must own considerable athletic skill to have made his present perch. He didn’t, however, at all suggest one of the four splendid youths Gloria had lately imagined, since he was so out of scale with his mount that he looked like a more than usually shrunken jockey, or even like one of those unfortunate monkeys clinging on for dear life during an equestrian turn in a circus. The neighbouring horse had the appearance of turning its head to give him a glance of disdain. Gloria was just going to laugh at this when her new acquaintance burst into surprising speech.
‘Good God! It’s an utter outrage. They’ll allow anything, absolutely anything. What they’re not actively corroding with fumes and acids from their beastly factories they’re simply allowing to sink and slide into the lagoon. Those horses are as precious as anything surviving from the ancient world. And the next thing we’ll see is yahoos like that carving their names on their flanks.’
Gloria – apart from considering this last an improbable prognostication – was astonished by
the vehemence of the prospective cinema patron’s tone. And a moment later she had caught in it something more: the note of high indignation against the general Philistine cast of things in the modern world that she associated with certain of her mother’s visitors to Nudd. Persons professionally concerned with the arts, they had commonly been. And suddenly a clear memory came to her.
‘Do you know?’ she said. ‘I think we’ve just glimpsed each other once before.’
‘Have we?’ For a brief moment the young man was taken aback. ‘It’s quite possible, Miss Montacute. For I think you are Miss Montacute, aren’t you? I’ve been to your house, as a matter of fact.’ His manner had become grave and candid. ‘I haven’t mentioned it, because it was on the day your mother died. It seemed an awkward thing to speak of, straight away.’
‘You drove down with another man.’
‘Yes, indeed: Lambert Domberg, the head of my firm. My name’s Octavius Chevalley. What an odd encounter this is.’
‘It’s all of that,’ Kirstie Anderson said crisply.
Chapter Fourteen
ROMANCE IN A GONDOLA
Chevalley had started at a disadvantage. There had been an element of dissimulation in his approach which, although surely insignificant, Gloria Montacute’s friend had firmly underlined at once. But he had extricated himself deftly enough, since hesitation in referring to Mrs Montacute’s still recent demise had been both credible and creditable. Certainly Gloria (as was her habit) had given him the benefit of any doubt she may have entertained.
For a start, Il Prigionero di Zenda had been a success. It was a predictably romantic affair, sporting as many cloaks and daggers as one could imagine, but the young man had enjoyed it in a thoroughly uncondescending way. As a film it could hardly be called groovy; it was unaware of either the Ken Russell or the Andy Warhol angle; the scenario might have come from the talented and facile pen of Barbara Cartland herself. But Octavius Chevalley clearly liked Anthony Hope’s hero – almost aspired towards him, one could feel – so that Gloria soon ceased to fear that she had beckoned him (not that she had beckoned) into the viewing of a childishly naive spectacle. After the show they had gone to the sort of trattoria Kirstie and she would certainly not have found for themselves, and there enjoyed a supper – a wantonly extra meal – of a sort that boarding-houses on the Zattere would judge it impolitic to set before an Anglo-Saxon clientele. And Chevalley had taken it for granted that they’d all three go Dutch.
During the succeeding few days it did sometimes come to Gloria as surprising that she had rapidly arrived on terms of some intimacy with a young man whom Harry Carter had promised one day to belt until he snivelled. She had to admit to herself – for she had a considerable command of sober realism – that she could see Octavius Chevalley snivelling. He wasn’t a husky type. But she was humbly aware of herself as a person living on the mere fringe of the civilised. Nudd, or the parties at Nudd, had been a good deal frequented by phoneys; yet she hadn’t been unconscious of the occasional presence of persons of a genuinely finer grain. And Octavius belonged to them.
That he had become Octavius within twenty-four hours wasn’t in itself remarkable; if one accepts a new acquaintance at all one also accepts the conventions of one’s time. Kirstie, indeed, had stuck out for ‘Mr Chevalley’ for long enough to intimate a reserve, but she had abandoned this before it approached singularity. As a trio they were soon getting on very well.
At the start, Gloria didn’t, indeed, as they went around together, do a great deal of thinking about Octavius. She did rather more thinking about Harry. She wondered how he was getting on as a full back. He had a dogged quality, she felt, that augured reasonably well for that place kicking. If he would only practise it from every angle – particularly the awkward ones – with the grim pertinacity of a top tennis player getting up his backhand drive there was no telling how far he mightn’t go. She’d been unable to resist saying this over again on one of her postcards – although she’d only sent the postcards at all out of a sense of guilt, or at least compunction, at having done a luckless belting act herself. On that dreadful evening Harry had behaved very well, and he’d scarcely deserved so sharp a rebuff in answer to an almost unconsciously straying hand. She found it impossible (could it conceivably be disturbingly impossible?) to imagine Octavius’s hand behaving in that way. But then Harry was a simple creature, and to be accepted as such.
Not that Octavius didn’t have his own boldness. He must have been aware that his two chance-met companions weren’t exactly aesthetes, but he took it pleasingly for granted that in Venice everybody looks at pictures. He was himself here to look at pictures in what was no doubt a learned and recondite way: there seemed to be absolutely nothing he didn’t know. This was particularly true of Vittore Carpaccio (he was able to remind Gloria that there was a Carpaccio at Nudd), and it turned out that Carpaccio was extremely entertaining even for people who weren’t learned at all. Carpaccio seemed to have invented the comic strip – only he told stories each episode in which was a vast and crowded painting, so that a set of them were sufficient to clothe the walls of a large room. They weren’t, of course, actually comic, except perhaps the one called St Jerome Leading his Lion into a Monastery. It was a different sort of lion from St Mark’s, but so extravagantly benevolent that the perturbation occasioned in the monastery was very funny indeed. It didn’t look as if Carpaccio had taken religious occasions or the legends of saints all that seriously. But he had certainly done a most devoted job on the city of Venice.
‘In all these pictures,’ Octavius said instructively, ‘one sees people making an everyday assignment of holding the gorgeous East in fee. You chuck your carpets casually over your balcony to air, but they’re spoil from Trebizon and Samarkand. The same with your washing. The stuffs are so splendid that you can hang them out of the windows of palaces, and leave them there during even the most imposing state occasions.’
‘Did they wear their best clothes always?’ Gloria asked.
‘Oh, they only had best clothes. So they had to wear them for the most humdrum ploys. For no end macabre ones too. You might be sent out with your pals to martyrise a queen and her ten thousand attendant virgins. A gory bow-and-arrow affair. But you preserved an extreme of elegance in your tenue. Just look.’
In her childhood Gloria had been told so often just to look that it was remarkable how unresentfully and even zestfully she was doing so now. She even made her own discoveries.
‘The lap-dogs and the chimney-pots,’ she said. ‘He remembered to get them in.’
‘The lap-dogs have changed a little – but the chimney-pots not a bit. You can still see them in Venice today. I expect you could buy one, Gloria, and take it home as a souvenir. It would be something you haven’t got at Nudd already. You have some of the silks and velvets Carpaccio painted – perhaps the very ones, which is an awesome thought – but not his chimney-pots. Or what about a Moor? Let’s stroll down to the Riva degli Schiavoni and see if we can pick you up a Moor cheap.’
‘Was there much racial prejudice?’ Miss Anderson asked. Her inbred Scottish seriousness frequently surfaced by way of reaction to nonsense.
‘Well, of course the principal piece of evidence is Shakespeare’s Othello, and unfortunately it can be read in different ways. But look at the black man who’s just going to take a header into the canal. It’s his own idea, wouldn’t you say? Nobody bullying him. But is he a shade undernourished, perhaps? Kirstie, you ought to have a professional eye for that.’
As he produced this slightly persevering gaiety, Chevalley glanced not at Kirstie but at Gloria. And suddenly he was blushing again. Gloria perceived this with a shock. It took her mind straight back to something that was worrying her from time to time. There was a gap – it might be thought of as a credibility gap – between Octavius Chevalley now and Octavius Chevalley as she had first glimpsed him: the young man who had momentarily eyed her from a big car with what could only be remembered as amused contempt – the youn
g man, in fact, for whom a belting lay in store. He had seen a fat girl ludicrously intertwined with a scramble of puppies, and his manners had deserted him at the sight. Because he had said something about an undernourished Negro, he was himself remembering the occasion now.
Well, it would be ungenerous to hold it against him, Gloria thought. A fat girl is a fat girl. Only it was just a shade humiliating that this particular aspect of herself remained distinguishably vivid in his mind. She now had the key to another moment – here in the Accademia – only half an hour before. There was a painter her mother had called Palma Vecchio, but whom Octavius called Jacopo Palma. Octavius had pointed to a rather boring picture called a Sacred Conversation by this man, and said he’d had a special line in female saints characteristically Venetian in their ample charms. And as he’d uttered this quite amusing phrase he’d suddenly and awkwardly pulled himself up. There was now no misunderstanding that. The important thing to hold on to seemed to be that he was a sensitive young man. He probably woke up in the middle of the night and did this blushing business in bed.
They moved on rather abruptly to Tintoretto now, and looked at an enormous thing called St Mark Rescuing a Slave. Octavius seemed to feel Tintoretto fairly safe. Tintoretto, on the whole, went in for spare and elongated forms.
It would be extravagant to claim that, with the learned Chevalley as cicerone, Gloria was belatedly embarking upon an artistic education. She wasn’t one of those Anglo-Saxon girls, seemingly sensuously inert, who are awakened at the touch of the warm south to new potentialities of response and perception. Or not quite. But she was certainly seeing things more vividly than before, and wasn’t unaware of it: at times it struck her particularly as she came out of a gallery or a church. Here, outside, was something continuous with things she had been dutifully viewing within. This hadn’t used to happen when she walked out of Nudd in quest of fresh air.
A Palace of Art Page 12
