‘San Michele – the place there’s a story about?’ Gloria, although not a literary character, had recalled Axel Munthe’s celebrated book.
‘Well, no, that’s another one – near Naples.’ Octavius was amused, and Gloria found she quite liked amusing Octavius. ‘The cemetery island is called San Michele. But, you see, this one – and it’s really quite tiny – had about 20,000 inhabitants at one time. Their ghosts are bound to be around. You’re going to adore Torcello.’ Octavius produced one of his attractive, because rare, displays of confidence. ‘It has a kind of enchanted effect. Sleeping Beauty stuff.’
This was true. They walked along the margin of a narrow canal to a tiny basin, and in front of them there distinguishably appeared the vestiges of a piazza which must have been, at some remote time, the centre of a flourishing town.
‘How many of the 20,000 are left?’ Gloria asked.
‘119.’ This was Octavius’s confidence again – founded, although Gloria didn’t know it, on his possession of a guide book of his own. ‘All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.’ He seemed, rightly, to judge this too mysterious. ‘But it’s lunch time, don’t you think? And we can look round a bit afterwards.’
Gloria wasn’t too excited to enjoy her lunch in what proved to be an open-air restuarant. But she was excited – and also, for some reason she couldn’t get down to, puzzled as well. Of course she was puzzled, for a start, by the spectacle of what was apparently happening to her. Apart from a brief and not agreeable impression which itself wasn’t exactly far back in time, she’d known this young man for less than a week. And nobody outside one of Mrs Bantry’s novelettes – she thought, recalling books she’d picked up in the kitchen at Nudd – totters on the verge of serious commitment on the strength of an acquaintanceship of quite that brevity. You’d have to belong to the most casual sleeping-around crowd to think of getting cracking at such a pace.
But then, she had to ask herself, was there what could be called a serious commitment in question? She now liked Octavius Chevalley very much – a good deal more, oddly enough, than before his bad behaviour on the previous night. But she wasn’t at all clear about what kind of liking it was. She was still interrogating herself about this as she ate something called mascapone, which Octavius had discovered on the menu and triumphantly declared to be the perfect close to a meal. It was certainly very good. But it didn’t answer Gloria’s question, which was simply whether she was in love with Octavius. And she failed to reflect – after all, she was very young – that it is a question which those who are in love don’t often have to ask themselves.
Yet however she wondered about herself, she wondered about Octavius a good deal more. When he wasn’t being gay he was being very nervous. And although this was right and proper – or at least was right and proper in a story-book way – there was something about the quality of it that was disturbing. He seemed less a man with something on his mind than a man with something on his chest. But that, of course, must be his folly on the gondola. If he was going to tell Gloria that he loved her (and by now she hadn’t a doubt that he was going to do just this), then he certainly had an awkward fence to take. The episode could no doubt be played down, passed off as a piece of fooling which had turned out a flop and in bad taste. At any rate, Octavius certainly felt he had to speak about it.
Gloria would have preferred him not to. She had now accepted Kirstie’s explanation of the affair, and was finding it touching rather than either offensive or even absurd. Octavius must be a very inexperienced young man to have fumbled after so odd a stratagem. Perhaps he did get things out of books, just as Kirstie had suggested. But that was rather appealing, really. It made him, somehow, as vulnerable as a boy – say, as a clever boy, without the resource of physical robustness, tumbled into the bullying and bewildering life of a big school.
There was very little lucidity in these thoughts of Gloria’s, and she certainly didn’t go on to ask whether they might hint a substantial element of the maternal in the hovering relationship between Octavius and herself. What she did go on to was to acknowledge that her whole speculation wasn’t quite in the target area. Octavius was certainly going to declare his passion (as Mrs Bantry’s authoresses would have put it). There was no question in her mind as to what. But he was also going to say she just didn’t know what.
Chapter Seventeen
A CONFESSION
They looked at the cathedral. It had been a good deal altered – and mainly for the worse, Octavius said – in 1008. Gloria gazed with proper respect at a fabric which had been monkeyed with (as a rapid calculation informed her) 58 years before all that about William the Conqueror. When at school she had been taken on appropriate cultural expeditions to various English abbeys, roofless and inanimate. (‘Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,’ she recalled the English mistress quoting between explanations of the mysteries of night-stairs and reredorters.) But a cathedral still very much roofed but entirely unworshipped in was unfamiliar and disconcerting. It looked almost as if something extravagantly splendid had been dredged out of the lagoon. There were great marble columns, not hard-veined but softly shimmering like water, and fading towards their base into a kind of seaweed green. There was a floor like an ocean floor upon which foundered galleons had split out a treasury of plundered gems.
‘The superannuations of sunk realms,’ Octavius said softly – thus obeying (although Gloria didn’t know it) the same impulse as the English mistress. ‘But did you notice that they’ve turfed out Attila’s chair?’
‘Attila’s chair?’
‘Of course it has nothing to do with him. It used to be in here, but now they’ve dumped it in the little campo. We passed it coming in.’
Gloria ought to have noticed this. But she didn’t worry. What she was aware of was that Octavius wasn’t showing off; it was just that all this was his thing.
‘Do you like the peacocks?’ Octavius suddenly asked.
She did like the peacocks. They were carved on a marble panel beside a big pulpit: long-necked creatures stretching up to reach a kind of bird-bath at the top of a tall pillar. Of course they suggested the same sort of puzzle as the horses on St Mark’s: there seemed to be no reason why there should be peacocks in a cathedral.
‘Do they mean something?’ she asked, commendably concerned to solve this small enigma.
‘Oh, yes.’ Octavius was flushed and pleased. ‘It’s a chalice that they’re drinking from – which tells you they’re the human soul grown incorruptible through the mystery of the Eucharist. It’s a Byzantine symbolism one meets with all over the place. Only this is the finest example I know. Just look at the tendrils of the vine.’
Gloria looked – at this and presently at much else. There were vast mosaics: over the apse a Virgin and Child surrounded by old gentlemen, and at the west end, a Last Judgement conceived by an imagination you couldn’t call exactly comfortable. It was alarming that there had ever been people who devoutly believed in an occasion of that sort. Perhaps it was all true, Gloria thought – and immediately conceived of herself as tumbled naked into an uncompromisingly bubbling cauldron.
‘You can put 100 lire into one of those tape recorder things,’ Octavius was saying, ‘and listen to a spiel about the history of the place. But there’s something in Torcello that I like better. So will you. Come on.’
They went into the second church, which was a much smaller one. It would have been insignificant altogether, Gloria thought, if it hadn’t been the only other considerable building still extant on the island. She was just going to ask Octavius why it had been necessary to have a little church next door to the big one, when Octavius spoke first.
‘And this is beauty,’ Octavius said. ‘The real, the absolute thing.’
For a full minute Gloria produced no reply. She knew Octavius must be right, because it had become an article of faith with her that he was always right about these high and mysterious matters. But she wasn’t seeing what he was se
eing, and it was another article of faith with her – and one of much longer standing – that one didn’t pretend about them for the sake of polite conversation. This church – it was called Santa Fosca – seemed to be nothing much at all: a humble little blunted Greek cross in shape, and in fabric constructed from rough brick – the colour of the pale sort of salmon that comes out of inexpensive tins. There were eight marble columns corresponding to the simple octagonal plan, and it was true that they ended in rather splendid capitals of what she remembered were the Corinthian order. But what these supported was dark wooden beams with the marks of the adze on them, and these reminded her of an old barn. The one running north and south in front of the business part of the church had a row of sharp iron spikes on top of it, such as might be put up to keep you out of a dangerous area in a zoo. There wasn’t much to look at anywhere – unless it was another couple of those talking-machines into which you put a 100-lire piece. The plainness extended to what she remembered were called the Stations of the Cross, which are commonly revolting strip-cartoon affairs not a bit like Carpaccio. Here they were just small carved crosses let into the walls. She wondered whether poor unassuming little Santa Fosca had been plundered at some time or other.
‘It’s a pity about the mobile,’ Octavius said.
Gloria followed Octavius’s glance and saw that he was looking at a kind of candelabrum thing hanging from the flattish wooden cupola. ‘Mobile’ had been a joke – a rather uncertain joke, as if Octavius was preparing to defend himself against some Philistine response to the place which she might herself put up. But she saw that the object he was referring to was somehow not quite right; it was too like the gimmicky electrical contraptions that hung in hideous hugger-mugger in Italian lamp shops.
It was when she had seen this that Gloria suddenly saw the whole thing. Here, of course, is a vague phrase – but it must be vague since it has to cover a good deal. Gloria’s perception that Santa Fosca was beautiful to just the degree that Octavius had declared was also her perception that they had arrived where Octavius had all the time intended. This was his place, his particular place, his inner sanctum within what was plainly his larger home, the city of Venice. And he’d had to bring her here. Considering these patent facts, Gloria was also constrained to admit that her perception of Santa Fosca as beautiful was, yet again, also her perception of a rather deeper hinterland to her feelings about her new acquaintance even than those which she had candidly been owning to herself.
‘Let’s sit down on those steps,’ Octavius said suddenly. ‘I don’t think anybody else is going to come in. Gloria, I’ve something I must tell you.’
Gloria was visited by an inconsequent memory of sitting down on baled straw. The straw had been prickly. The marble was cold. But, of course, the memory wasn’t inconsequent. The two occasions held both similarities and contrasts. She didn’t, however, have leisure to work these out. She had to listen to Octavius. Octavius, who had turned extraordinarily pale, was saying something about Nudd.
‘Nudd?’ Gloria repeated. She didn’t see how Nudd could come into the matter now so plainly in hand. She herself had scarcely thought of Nudd and its perplexing riches for weeks.
‘I think you know that – on that day I hate reminding you of – I went down with Lambert Domberg. He’s my boss. He takes a tremendous interest in the collection. He has strong views on what it would be wise to do about it.’
‘Quite a lot of people have that.’ With an obscure dismay, Gloria realised that Octavius, for some unaccountable reason, had embarked on a prepared speech. Not that he had much chance of getting to the end of anything of the kind. He was much too agitated. But he did manage to get out what were – although Gloria didn’t yet grasp it – the crucial words upon which, however confusedly, everything else must follow.
‘It’s why I came to Venice.’
‘You mean this man Domberg sent you?’
‘Not exactly. In fact, I suggested it myself – I suppose just because I like getting here.’
‘I see.’ Suddenly, Gloria saw much more. ‘Do you mean that our meeting—there in the Piazza—wasn’t just chance?’
‘Your solicitor told Domberg where you were staying.’
‘Mr Thurkle is almost the only person who would know.’ Having made this inessential remark, Gloria at once came out with something very essential indeed. ‘Octavius, why do you have to tell me this? Why aren’t you just carrying on with the plan?’
‘With the plot.’ These three words came from Octavius in a voice Gloria didn’t like. A book would have called it a strangled voice. Octavius was launched on a scene of abasement. It was something he’d have a flair for. ‘It’s very complicated,’ he said, and gave Gloria a hopeless glance.
‘It sounds quite simple to me.’
‘Well, yes – in a way. I was to make friends with you, and suggest what would be a good line to follow. A big sale, you know.’
‘At least we have made friends.’
‘Yes – you, me, and Kirstie.’ Octavius’s voice now trembled. Gloria, who knew that inflexible justice was the absolutely essential thing, told herself this wasn’t a turn. There was that saving grace to it. Octavius was terribly moved. She hoped he was going to have the manhood not to weep.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Kirstie. I don’t quite see the relevance of your performance last night. Not if a brisk business discussion was the idea.’
‘I think I had another idea, too.’
‘Octavius – hadn’t we better drop all this? We’ve made friends, and that’s it. I think the next vaporetto would be the best thing. No p.m. That’s what Kirstie would say.’
‘A filthy venal notion. And now I have to tell you.’
‘Octavius, you have told me. No need to spell everything out.’
‘I’m just frightfully sorry. Because I do so tremendously admire you, Gloria.’
There was mingled in this what taxed Gloria a good deal. What Octavius’s last words chiefly carried was what they finally excluded. That she is tremendously admired is not what a girl in a certain state of feeling – or who has been verging on that state – precisely wants to hear. But Octavius had arrived at honesty. And he might have failed to do that. She might have had to find him out, yet more painfully, later on. She wondered whether the pervasive chill she felt was just seeping up from the cold marble of Santa Fosca. Whether this was so or not, it would be sensible to stand up and get moving. But suddenly Octavius said a very strange thing.
‘Gloria – it’s not that I don’t find you physically splendid.’
She stared at him, and saw that he was, so to speak, taking time off her humiliation to peer in a puzzled way at his own. And that was about enough: how right Kirstie was to put a ban on any sort of p. m.
Gloria rose abruptly to her feet. Then, obeying a sudden impulse, she stretched down a hand to Octavius, as one may do to a lazy companion in such circumstances. He took it with a wondering look, and without speaking. Still in silence, they left the little church. It was very warm outside, and there was a smell of dry hay. She noticed what must be Attila’s chair. But she didn’t want ever again to have the antiquities of Italy explained to her.
Yet she oughtn’t simply to write Octavius off; to give the effect of ordering him from her presence with an indignant mien and a flashing eye. He’d deeply wounded her – but how could he have known he was going to do precisely that? Did he even know it now? Had he much notion of having touched her heart – touched it in the way he’d been shamefully proposing to pretend that she had touched his? All the same, whatever he’d felt or believed, his clean-breast-of-it resolution hadn’t been ignoble. Yet perhaps it hadn’t been sensible or even sensitive either. When he’d discovered he was up to something it wasn’t in him to bring off, or that was too contemptible to go on with, he would perhaps have done best simply to organise an unspectacular fading out. For in that case he’d have left behind him in Gloria’s memory nothing that couldn’t be classified as what Kirstie h
ad called ‘one of those sudden holiday things’, an attraction that hadn’t developed, an incipient love-affair that hadn’t come off. As it was, she was left with a feeling she found it hard to put a name to – but she thought of it as related to the feeling you get if you go up to your room and discover it has been burgled. And she hated the fear she had that she might later come to nourish a mean resentment, to tell herself that she’d been humiliated and hurt just because Octavius Chevalley, having chickened out of an enterprise (or brace of enterprises) he hadn’t the nerve for, had salved his vanity by turning on a bit of theatre. This would be a foul thing to come to believe, because it wouldn’t be really true.
They walked back to the quay still without speaking. There was no sign of a vaporetto, and Octavius muttered something to the effect that their wait might be up to half an hour. Gloria very much wished that she was clever enough to be able to think of the right things to say. She had a notion of what they were, but no words for them. She wanted to tell him that they were both young; that when young one flounders about, seeing oneself as this or that, getting into false positions every second time one steps out, alarmed and trying to kid oneself if one finds oneself without some impulse or ambition or standard which convention takes for granted. She wanted to say things like this, but in fact, she wasn’t able to say much. For one thing, she simply knew far too little about the inner nature of this acquaintance of a week. And she wasn’t likely ever to learn more. It was true that, by the time the little boat did come, they were managing to smile at one another ruefully, and that when half-way across the lagoon they were exchanging civilised remarks. But treachery remains treachery, and can’t be more than briefly scotched by remorse, compunctions, or generous feelings. Gloria knew very well that she and Octavius Chevalley were already each a painful episode in the other’s past – and that, forty years on, they still wouldn’t be too pleased by an accidental meeting at a party.
A Palace of Art Page 15
