The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  It is hard, I see, to put Penny – the still quite young Penny – faithfully on the page while at the same time seeking to suggest the complex way in which I was in love with her. Did I see her much less clearly then than I do now? I doubt it. Time hasn’t to be called in to unveil Penny, much less to unmask her. At times she was to surprise me, but it was the residual surprise of the sculptor at what his chisel frees: a form known to him in its essentials from a first moment in the studio or the quarry. Penny was all there from the start; and at least at the start her absurdities and perversenesses (a necessary if clumsy word) were part of her enchantment.

  It has become fashionable to put in the forefront of one’s description of a woman – be she fictitious, or alive and resident still in the next street – that she was this or that in bed. I suppose I could go about Penny in such a way. Certainly I was much occupied with her in bed – there being times, indeed, when this seemed self-evidently the whole thing. But here detailed exposition, whether to be regarded as decorous or not, wouldn’t be easy. If I were to say that Penny was at once enterprising to a point of astonishment, taking in her little stride measures of which I had only read in books, and at the same time undeviatingly detached and cool like one participating in the mildest social rituals; if I were to say this, and elaborate upon it, I should arrive at a needlessly unsympathetic picture of my wife upon these intimate occasions. Penny’s coolness wasn’t cold. The elusiveness whereby she would suddenly be occupying herself less with the affair in hand than with a disarranged coiffure was attractive in itself. I’d have felt cheated had she made away with it.

  I puzzled less about Penny than about myself – about myself, that is, in relation to her. At the time of my marriage, I had drifted into that casual and carnal view of sex which possesses young men with some element of bafflement and frustration behind them in adolescence. It might be held that I did so the more readily because of assumptions and norms of conduct current among the sort of people with whom I was beginning to make my way. One can always blame a lot on the theatre, as on literary and artistic society in general. But in fact to almost any sort of artist seriously inclined, the sirens’ unsupported song becomes boring after a time, seems to turn to mere Fescennine piping, so that he will listen to it only in those phases of fatigue and desauvrement which are likely to plague him intermittently throughout his career. Alert, he wants his sensual music interwoven with other themes. And if one seeks to know how other people are compounded a simplistic view of sex is of little utility. There were a good many purely social filaments in the web spun for me by Penny Triplett.

  There was the strand of upbringing, for a start. I think I have recorded that the Triplett ancestry lay in that odd aristocracy of intellect, curiously bound together as much by marriage and thickening consanguinity as by vocation and intelligence, which had so strikingly predominated in England throughout the Victorian Ages and the Edwardian Age. This alone had for a time commanded my imagination a good deal. Behind young Pattullo had lain on the one hand a father who was an isolated and splendid phenomenon sprung up amid the folk, and on the other hand, the little lairdly people of Glencorry, confident in their immemorial station but innocent of anything that a restless boy could think of as a movement of mind. From Penny herself, indeed, inherited intellectual habit appeared to have almost entirely fined away, so that mere upper-classness was her predominant note. But not quite. She held a confident belief that large subjects were amenable to small talk, and that there was nothing on which she couldn’t adequately have her word. She knew the names; she could catch the tone; and she was, for that matter, quite far from being an uneducated girl.

  When I first encountered her, therefore, Penny stood out in dazzling contrast to my Glencorry cousins. Anna and Ruth – relieving their boredom with cheap romances, walking their slavering dogs, glumly counting the slaughtered grouse in the rain – would have been dumb, resentful, outraged in the presence of Penny’s widely-ranging prattle. (So, for that matter, would their parents.) Yet between these lumpish girls and Penny, there was a link. They all had an unfaltering certainty about their place in the world.

  In my earlier visits to Corry Hall, I must have stood a good deal in awe of my cousins. While still in shorts, indeed, I had recognised them as extremely stupid. But there I was, sufficiently scruffy to feel very much filius terrae in an oppressively ancestral abode; and there were they – discontented, it is true, but at the same time inexpugnably assured of their own consequence. And I could make no impression on them (or only on Anna as being for certain purposes less chancy in the heather than some gillie’s son). Year after year as I went back to the place I must have been better-informed, more in command of rapid speech and even a kind of wit, eager to argue, entertain, and (no doubt) show off. But nothing of all this made me of any use to my cousins. I can’t have been pleased.

  Penny’s upbringing, in the nursery and schoolroom sense, may have been very much the same as that of the Glencorry girls. Put all three in a room, stop your ears to anything except social cadence, and it might be some time before you much distinguished between them. But Penny had been trained to believe that conversation was not merely a duty but a pleasure as well. My Aunt Charlotte frowned only on awkward silences; old Mrs Triplett, Penny’s hostess and chaperon when we first met, would view with disfavour any remark lacking at least some positive quality: incisiveness, perhaps; or lively interest; or reach of information; or simple elegance of phrase. Penny had been taught to be alert, receptive, responsive – preconditions to which, when achieved, she was free to add any nonsense or prettiness she chose. I suppose she was the first girl in whom I ever encountered this remunerative social discipline. It even included, although sparely and to an effect of irony or fun, an element of old-fashioned deference to the brute fact of one’s masculinity. This was something new to me as a boy; such persiflage would have been impossible from Janet; the charm of it in Penny must have lingered with me long after I had become familiar with a wide variety of feminine batteries.

  These have been thoughts prompted by my wedding journey to Calabria. We drove there in a car a good deal more impressive, if less businesslike, than that in which Fish and I, during my first long vacation, had effected our extensive survey of the ‘art cities’ of Italy. Penny had got up this more restricted project to her customary standard of drawing-room research. It was to be Salvator Rosa terrain (What savage Rosa dashed, she quoted from some poem) and there were to be abundant hints of Mrs Radcliffe, whose romances were enjoying a vogue at that time. In particular there were to be banditti, and Penny was not without hope that these might endeavour to capture us and hold us to ransom – in which case she would gain a useful measure of my manhood right from the start. I said that in such an event, it might be the brigands’ manhood that she would be more immediately made aware of, and we entertained ourselves with lurid fantasies based upon this supposition. I can see this nonsense now as not unconnected with a certain tug which the perverse could exercise over Penny’s sexual imagination, and possibly communicate to my own.

  An hour out from Naples, and fatefully as it was to transpire, I had the idea of making the short detour which would take us to Ravello, being prompted to show Penny a place that lingered in my memory – and in which, indeed, I had stumbled unwittingly upon a sexual episode again not of the most straightforward sort, although no banditti had been involved in it. I had told Penny the story of Colonel Morrison and Alec Mountjoy. I suppose I told her everything within my experience that came into my mind. Or almost everything. For I think I never mentioned any matters concerning the girl who, many years ahead, was to become the wife of Ranald McKechnie.

  Ravello hadn’t much changed in the nine or ten years since I had been there. Turismo hadn’t gained its hoped-for grip, although it proliferated on the coast below: there, entire monasteries were being transmogrified into hotels, including one reputed to have been founded by St Francis himself. Ravello remained a slumbering little town, only less
un-prosperous than Scala perched on the opposite hill. Penny professed herself at once as having fallen in love with it – an instance of a kind of obligingness in which she had considerable facility. She had decided, a shade extravagantly, that I owned a strong sentimental regard for the place; and she felt that enthusiasm, which costs nothing, would contribute to the general niceness which she was at that time genuinely predicating for our marriage. As a consequence, we decided on a stay of several nights –not in the hotel where Fish and I (and possibly D. H. Lawrence before us) had put up, but in one, declared by the guide-book to be rather grander, at the other end of the town. We had hardly settled in, however, before Penny discovered from the same source of information or misinformation that Ibsen had written A Doll’s House in a hotel at Amalfi a few miles away. She was all for moving there at once, being as excited at the thought of dining, so to speak, with Nora Helmer as Fish and I had been intrigued at sleeping in a room haunted by the ghosts of Connie Chatterley and her lover. It would certainly have been a splendid talking-point for a party. But fortunately Ravello had Wagner on its side, to say nothing of E. M. Forster – a figure as legendary as Norman Douglas but indubitably alive, with whom Ravello might be discussed at an encounter to be engineered one day. So Penny returned to being in love with our present surroundings, and we ate our dinner in amity. Yet, if we had transferred to Amalfi, various things could have fallen out differently and various destinies been altered. Henry Tindale, the White Rabbit of Surrey Four, had vacated his fellowship and now lived there permanently. I may well have been unaware of this, since news from Oxford came to me scantily at that time; certainly he never entered my head during those days at Ravello, although I had known long before of his owning a retreat in the neighbourhood. We might have run into him, however, and the immediate course of events might have been changed as a result. In which case we’d never have seen the Villa d’Orso, nor would Frediano (‘Come son’ crudele, le donne!’) have been known to us at a not distant future time.

  This is conjecture, and conjecture of a trite sort. The Villa d’Orso was a fact – an attractive fact, even although (and initially partly because) only to be peered at through a small iron grille. It took its name as commanding, in common with its neighbour the Palazzo Rufolo, the sweep of coast-line closed by Capo d’Orso to the west. It wasn’t itself commanded, since it owned that sort of ingenious seclusion amid a huddle of other dwellings which only Italian architecture can contrive. It was small and unassuming, but hinted a respectable antiquity. Its English equivalent would have been an affair of thatch and what house-agents term exposed beams. Penny, a very urban character, approved that sort of thing. She similarly approved the small garden of which a glimpse was also afforded us. It was untended and had been invaded by everything that grows in spring in the valleys of the Dragone and the Raginna. A knowledge of wild flowers was part of Penny’s correct education, and she fell to enumerating them rapidly: wood anemone, periwinkle minor, green hellebore, rock cress, euphorbia. I was thinking again of Penny’s party manner – for it was just thus that she would efficiently tick off current books or plays – when she suddenly cried out to me.

  ‘Oh, Duncan,’ she said, ‘the deep, deep cyclamen! And the lizards—starting again!’

  The cyclamen were indeed deep in hue – glowing in shadowed moist places almost with the fire of gentians in snow. The lizards, darting from crevice to crevice on a crumbling wall, were in process of shedding tetterous skins to reveal a summer green.

  ‘And dung beetles,’ I said. ‘Dung beetles among the asphodels. It’s emblematical. Mortality and immortality.’ I produced this deep thought at random, and while reflecting on the significance of the fact that I could be arrested by any impulse of spontaneity on Penny’s part. For her exclamations hadn’t represented her assuming for the moment a charming role; it was a real Penny who had swiftly responded to the little creatures at once so slumberous and so electrically alive; to the flowers so magically uttering the mystery of earth. I suddenly knew that I much wanted to have children by Penny, and that at the end of our twenties we had no time to waste. But what I went on to say was prosaic enough. ‘It’s not exactly ben mantenuto, is it? The house must have been untenanted for ages.’

  ‘Duncan, you must climb in!’ Penny cried. Her mood had changed to that of a slightlyslightly factitious urgency. ‘You must climb in and get me some corms. Half-a-dozen will do.’

  ‘Corms?’

  ‘The cyclamen bulbs, of course. I’ll plant them in one of our little terra-cotta troughs—the ones with putti from Impruneta. As a giardino di finestra. They’ll look absolutely marvellous.’

  ‘Yes. But if you want cyclamen bulbs we can dig up any number in the woods. I’ve an idea they’re surprisingly large and go quite deep down.’

  ‘The barbed wire is rather rusty. But I think you can wriggle through.’

  ‘I don’t intend to do anything of the sort.’

  ‘And—darling—see if you can get into the house. Perhaps you can unbolt something and let me in as well.’

  ‘Why not do the wriggling yourself?’ I asked. ‘You’re smaller than I am, even round the bottom.’ I knew very well that Penny would do no wriggling through wire, since she had old-fashioned views (or so I thought of them) on the physical activities appropriate in women – or appropriate in circumstances attended by any possibility of publicity. (There was to be an exception to this, but at present it lies some way ahead.)

  ‘Or there may be an easier way on the other side, and I’d hate you to scratch yourself, darling.’ Penny was expressing this rational solicitude because she knew that when I’d said I wouldn’t wriggle I’d meant it. She was very quick in assessing these minute situations. ‘Round the corner,’ she urged, gaily. ‘Come on!’

  The Villa d’Orso was surrounded on all sides by narrow scale running between high, blind walls. There was no yard of its perimeter, that is to say, that was level ground; everywhere you were treading one of those rocky and irregular staircases which in that part of Campania not only abound in the little towns or link podere with podere but think nothing of running up to mountain-tops as well. Being proportioned for the convenience of mules rather than men, these peculiar thoroughfares are irritating even on short stretches and distinctly fatiguing on longer ones. They are, of course, picturesque, and were part of what Penny was busily falling in love with.

  ‘There!’ Penny had halted triumphantly before a mouldering wooden door set in the garden wall, and secured by no more than a chain, one link of which was hitched over a rusty nail. ‘And, Duncan.’ she breathed, ‘look—just look!’ She pointed to an almost obliterated sign-board hanging askew above the door. The flaking paint read Casa in vendita. And below this announcement there had been scrawled, apparently at a somewhat later date, the encouraging addendum: a buon prezzo.

  ‘That’s what we’ll call it,’ Penny said. ‘II villino a buon prezzo. Won’t it be a splendid address? I can see it on our letter-head. Can’t you? Is there a harbour?’

  ‘A harbour?’ I repeated, and with a feeling that my bride had perhaps gone out of her mind quite in Mrs Radcliffe’s manner. ‘Do you mean a garage? There’s probably stabling of a sort.’

  ‘Stupid!’ Penny impatiently stamped a foot. ‘Down below, of course. In the place where the duchess lived before they strangled her.’

  ‘There’s a harbour of sorts at Amalfi—yes. Nothing much.’

  ‘Then that’s where we’ll keep our yacht. Darling, we’ll be free of the entire Tyrrhenian Sea. And we’ll get round the corner to the Ionian Sea as well. Like Gissing.’

  ‘Like Gissing.’ I wondered whether, for Penny, George Gissing – at a revival of whose reputation publishers were then labouring – was still as much in the land of the living as Mr Forster, and to be cultivated on what I was coming to recognise as her peculiar geographical plan. The Strait of Messina seemed rather a roundabout way to this particular lion hunt. That Penny cherished a dream of lions – a Pattullo salon –
was another fact I was getting a grasp of. Of course she wasn’t wholly serious. She was too sophisticated to be that. All this was an ironical sort of fun, and I was still sufficiently in love to be amused by it. Only Penny didn’t securely distinguish between fact and fantasy, and was capable of taking steps to actualise her imaginings in an impracticable and alarming manner.

  We entered the wild garden, and then the villa itself through a broken window. I bought it that afternoon, and at once had to resist Penny’s suggestion that we immediately follow this up by scouring the Costiera Amalfitana for a suitable yacht.

  Penny would scarcely have known one end of such a craft from the other, and I’d have been little better myself. Money seemed at that time not much of a consideration. My success with The Bear-Garden had persuaded me that I was going to earn more than later proved to be the case, and I was already aware of the effect which my father’s final ascent from eminence to fame was to have for Ninian and myself in that department of life. As for Penny, she had come into a lot of money on marriage under the will of a wealthy aunt.

  There was thus nothing rash in our sudden action, but I can see it now as evidence of my being no longer sure that youth goes on for ever. Calculation was beginning to touch my vision of our future married state. Penny, I felt, was too fond of a social life – metropolitan and modishly ‘with it’ in a nebulously artistic way – which I knew would irk me in more than moderate doses. ‘(This, paradoxically, was only the more true because just such a society provided the background for much that I wrote.) But Penny was also fond of Italy, as I was. Her Italian was better than mine, and although it was doubtless very politely Tuscan, she was clever at finding it intelligible when mutated into one or another outlandish dialect. She’d get no end of fun, I felt, out of superintending the virtual rebuilding of the semi-ruinous but potentially commodious little house, and fitting it out in a manner appropriate to cultivated persons well-seen in Italian antiquities. In a minuscule way, we’d take on between us the role of that Lord Grimthorpe who had dolled up the neighbouring Villa Cimbrone in a highly mediaeval and Decameron-like fashion. Ravello, as I have somewhere chronicled, finds mention in the Decameron, and although Boccaccio was by many centuries even less available for a salon than Norman Douglas, the circumstance was gratifying in itself.