The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  With some preliminary dispositions made, we drove south to Calabria. It was my guess that, banditti being little in evidence, so out-of-the-way a region would not please Penny for long, and that our first venture there would be our last. In this I proved to be in error. If there weren’t bandits there were fisherfolk – commonly lounging around tiny harbours as if the fish could wait. There were fishermen old and young, gnarled and twisted, or flawless in a first manhood, sun-tinted to copper or gold, their naked torsos like ancient bronzes dredged from the sea, and the rest of their persons scantily clothed in insolently paraded rags. Some of them, even the youngest, bore evidence that fishing really did go on – this as lacking a finger or two on one or another hand. Swordfish are a hazardous catch. Penny was fascinated by this latter macabre phenomenon. On several occasions when we went rowing or sailing – dutiful tourists not venturing to neglect some commended grotto or cave – she contrived to choose from among those eager to crew for us handsome youths thus strangely mutilated. I didn’t in the least object to their good looks, and would have picked them that way myself. But I think I’d equally instinctively have preferred four fingers to three. It would be easy to evolve a Freudian commentary on this small point of fascination in Penny.

  XIII

  The Villa d’Orso became habitable, and then in numerous ways rather more than merely that, with remarkable speed. Behind the curious system of straw screens which festoon Italian scaffolding the muratori worked furiously. Penny, superintending their labours, was charmed by their singing and unoffended when she caught the sense of the libidinous remarks they exchanged at her expense. In the interior, she was particularly concerned with the appointments of the gabinetto in which my masterpieces were to be written; they were certainly much in excess of anything Ibsen had enjoyed in his Amalfi hotel. The books were to live behind expanses of glass as if they were hot-house plants, and when I got tired of the view (which was tremendous), I could refresh myself by studying a large collage by Rauschenberg, at that time very much le dernier cri in advanced artistic circles. A certain restlessness attended the achieving of all this and much else, and as Penny was apt to remember that the next necessary object was presently located in London or Paris we spent a surprising amount of time suspended in air above the Alps. This was exhilarating in its way, and even conduced in snatches to a good deal of dramatic composition. In fact, I achieved under these conditions what turned out to be my worst play to date.

  Eventually we did in a fashion settle down, and Penny had leisure to take stock of our social situation. It wasn’t promising. Of her established acquaintances, the nearest lived in Rome, and if any of them owned house or land in territory getting on for the Meogiomo they had no disposition to put in time there. Ravello itself was not well provided with persons of cultivation, or even of substance. Lemon-groves bring nobody a fortune, or even shoes to the feet. Vineyards are another matter, and the two principal families of the place lived in a style attesting the fact. These showed us proper attention. Indeed, since they lived in a bitter rivalry which had subsisted for generations, they were ready to vie with one another in providing entertainment. But Penny judged them stodgy and bourgeois, and was shocked that they displayed little brass plates on their front doors intimating their status as oenologists. Beyond these people was a mere darkness until one reached the contadini, with whom she professed to be enchanted. But rustics don’t drop in for cocktails, and have never heard of Rauschenberg; they were thus only a limited resource. Moreover, these peasant neighbours of ours were for the most part either children, whose only interest lay in exchanging oranges for cigarettes, or seniors whom the advancing years were already contorting into a semblance of the olive trees surrounding them. Here and there, one came across a young woman, but hardly ever a young man. Campania is a region from which the able-bodied depart when they can. Fare San Michele, sloggiare, sgombrare: one learns that there are many terms for thus packing up and clearing out. What I hadn’t yet quite taken the measure of was the extent to which this state of affairs deprived Penny of a major interest in life.

  We were left with the White Rabbit. Henry Tindale wasn’t young, nor was he the kind of invert who is receptive and responsive in the company of women. Women simply alarmed him – and I believe it was for this reason, and not sheerly through lack of other society, that Penny took to him, or at least took him up. She enjoyed having him back away from her, or substitute for a simple exchange of glances a fixed glare over her shoulder. I don’t mean that she tormented him; on the contrary, she behaved very nicely. It is probable that Tindale felt she liked him, and was ashamed of the uneasiness he couldn’t shed in her presence. He wasn’t easy with me either – any more than he had been on that first evening of our acquaintance, when he had taken me into his bedroom and explained how undergraduates climbed into college through one of his windows. He had retired early from his fellowship, but not (as I was to discover some averred) in consequence of any impending scandal. From a family business of an unassuming sort he had come into a modest private fortune, and had used it to withdraw from a way of life that obscurely frightened him. He had managed to conclude his dealings with Pope Zosimus, some twenty years of unremitting study having enabled him to say of this obscure and fractious prelate all that fell to be said. I am not aware of ever having met anyone who had read Tindale’s book.

  Amalfi, like many towns on that coast, is in part ingeniously crammed into mere fissures in the rock. Tindale’s house lay at the stony heart of the place, and very much within sound of the duomo’s campanile. The great bell there may have reminded him of college days, but it was much more loquacious than anything Oxford would put up with. Although nothing much happens in Amalfi the inhabitants have a highly developed sense of time, and require a tintinnabulary performance every fifteen minutes throughout the day and night. The racket would have been insupportable but for the extraordinary construction of this crowded quarter. The narrow lanes consist of twisting scale which are for the most part roofed over; the wanderer in them may be said to be in open air, but his impression is of having penetrated to a troglodytic or catacombish manner of living. There is plenty of internal din, the denizens being seldom without matter to talk or shout or sing or whistle about from dawn until a very late hour. But the reverberations or shrill clangour and loud alarms from the belfry are muted by much intervening stone.

  Dwellings disposed within such a complex remain private even although populous, and it was as if the White Rabbit had secured a secluded retreat in the very middle of what was essentially a warren. He had established himself there on a vacation basis some years before retirement; in fact, this was the house which he had once regretted being unable to lend to Fish and myself because it was already promised to sojourners, who later proved to be Colonel Morrison and his boyfriend Alec Mountjoy. Now, at this later time, he shared the place for much of the year with a middle-aged friend of his own called Ulric Anderman. They were an oddly-assorted couple. Anderman was a baronet and his family of some antiquity, an ancestor of his having been in the first flight of those coaxed into that money-spinning order by James I. As a young man he had been a notable athlete. Then, when still young, he had become abruptly expatriate, spending the greater part of his time cruising idly round the Mediterranean basin. He and Tindale shared a powerful common interest, but it was of a kind which almost necessarily precluded their taking any such interest in one another. Penny, although inquisitive and learning all the time, was not yet well-seen in such situations. She imagined that two homosexuals sharing an establishment must as a matter of course be on the most intimate terms, and she expressed an extreme distaste at the thought of these two ‘ugly old men’ making love. But this was not at all the state of the case. Sexual deviations are almost always extremely specific, and Tindale and Anderman, because alike tied to the image of youth, were in a relationship untinged by erotic feeling. Indeed, there must at times have been jealousies and a mutual antagonism between them. Proust comments on
the distrust and suspicion of one another which inverts of identical disposition commonly feel. It was to the credit of these elderly Englishmen that they got along as they did.

  Penny’s distaste was far from taking us out of this couple’s society. On the contrary, she put in much time alertly watching for what wasn’t there, but which would no doubt have proved scabrously amusing if it had been; and I myself, as a consequence, found myself attending to them more than I might otherwise have done. It was my conclusion that, if their interests coincided, their achievements did not. They were temperamentally wide apart, and in a manner not unconnected, perhaps, with their social origins. For some three hundred years, the Andermans had been accustomed to grab or inflict what they chose, whereas it was probable that the Tindales had commonly been at the receiving end of the stick. Tindale was thus much the more conscious of the pressures of society; he was inhibited and unconfident where his friend was ruthless and untroubled. But there was more than this to the difference between them: something that went deeper than any social conditioning, and that inclined me to a more sympathetic attitude towards one man than the other. Anderman’s were all compassable goals; he knew the limits of what he was going to get; out of a certain monotony of event he extracted contentedly what variety he could. Tindale hadn’t thus come to terms with himself. He hoped for absurdities, and hesitated or halted before the cheated expectation his intelligence told him lay ahead. As undergraduates we hadn’t been quite wrong in writing him off as ineffective in the quest of what his nature prompted him to. I didn’t write him off now. I only wished him luck – or rather the rare miracle of a complete relationship which does sometimes come, like a spell of halcyon days, to people of his kind.

  But people of a kind almost endlessly subdivide, and there was another particular – developmental, this time – in which Tindale and Anderman differed. Tindale’s sexual orientation had, almost certainly, been from the first as it now was. This was why women alarmed him; they did so as small girls had once done. Anderman – but I was to learn this only at a later date – had a wife and children behind him. He had experienced, at a somewhat earlier age than the phenomenon is said commonly to occur, a complete change of sexual impulse; less, perhaps, a matter of something repressed breaking free than of the coming into being of a state of affairs with no existence hitherto, and this as the consequence of an obscure organic mutation. Such men are said frequently to go on sleeping with women in an intermittent way. Whether Anderman was one of these, I don’t know. He undoubtedly retained an interest in women: his observant and confident eye hinted a kind of amused connoisseurship which Penny, for one, responded to. She may have felt that Anderman could and should be rescued from anything so dismal as the relationship she imagined to subsist between him and Tindale. Or she may have been attracted by some fantasy of giving an additional kinky twist to an existing kinky setup. Where this might have taken her I can’t say. Where we did all arrive was on territory I simply hadn’t thought of.

  When I meditate about Penny, I see that all her frailties were comprehended within what, in another context, would be a virtue. It was her instinct swiftly to follow up hypothesis with experiment. This can win people Nobel prizes. With Penny it was, unfortunately, a matter of actually having a go at behaviour which respectable persons only indulge – and even then on a system of decent rationing – inside the security of their own heads. Yet the same mechanism could operate in her on an innocent level. Harmless things that it would be nice to do, she commonly contrived to bring about. One of these was that dream of sailing the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas. Here, in quite a short time, an obvious resource unfolded. A yacht of our own was impracticable for the present; having neither of us the slightest nautical skill, we should have been too much in the hands of unreliable persons. But Anderman owned both a yacht and a wide knowledge of the waters involved. This was the simplest reason why Penny judged Sir Ulric worth being attentive to. We were to go sailing with him.

  It might have been expected that Tindale, with his aversion to feminine society, would take a poor view of the idea – the more so as our presence on board the Ithaca might set a constraint upon what were presumably some of its customary freedoms. But this proved not so. Nervous and wary as Anderman was not, he seemed to spy a certain element of useful chaperonage in the occasional presence of a young married couple. And here I must explain what the customary course of things on the yacht turned out to be.

  The Ithaca, although commodious, was very handlable, so that Anderman and Tindale could easily sail it unassisted at need. At times, they would set out alone from Amalfi, and later pick up a suitable crew farther up or down the coast. At other times, they would recruit at Amalfi a couple of respectable youths (recommended by the parroco), cruise with them for some days, and then send them home, adequately remunerated, by bus, while themselves departing to other hunting-grounds in the deep south. It must have been rather like travelling post in horse-drawn times: another stage accomplished, there were always fresh animals to hand.

  This manner of predatory voyaging, the businesslike conduct of which is unendearing, had not been invented by our two Englishmen. Wealthy Germans were frequently to be observed thus industriously exploiting the poverty of Calabria – a poverty so deep as to be more shameful than most sexual irregularities.

  We made a couple of short voyages during which, granted these underlying conditions and interests, a reasonable decorum was observed. Our hosts were, I think, in a peculiar sense on holiday. They were known in many of the tiny ports and fishing villages into which we sailed. Old men, sitting in long rows on benches as if for a formal photograph, would raise an arm in familiar greeting; their sons or grandsons would come on board, sometimes in ones or twos seeking employment, and sometimes by the half-dozen, when they would scuffle and tumble around the deck – benevolently regarded by Anderman and Tindale, and with all the innocence of children on a Sunday School outing. In these maritime places young men were still plentifully in evidence; the sea and its perils continued to hold their allegiance; it was from the life of the soil, equally hard but much duller, that this whole age group was draining away. Those who crewed for us every now and then were probably prepared for a ready acquiescence in whatever turned up; either by previous experience or by repute they understood the tastes of their employers. There was nothing louche about them, all the same, and Penny would have been undisturbed by their conduct had she been my maiden aunt. Practised sailors, they gave themselves eagerly to mastering the particular mysteries of the Ithaca, they sang and laughed, and were as polite as they were undeniably easy on the eye. It was with surprise that one would glimpse them, when they judged themselves unobserved, treat each other to an obscene gesture or an indecent lunge. I recall Tindale as on one occasion seriously reprehending a lapse of this kind.

  Remembering Penny’s interest in such fisher-lads – an interest which, upon a wedding-journey, had been a shade out of the way – I wasn’t without the fear that she would occasion embarrassment by setting up in competition with our hosts for the regard, although not necessarily for the favours, of these engaging youths. They weren’t en disponibilite in the fashion they were because of any particular homosexual inclination in themselves, and it seemed to me that our hosts, however free with their money (which I suspected them of not being in any notable degree), wouldn’t stand a chance against my wife if she chose to entertain herself by cutting them out. That my min I could move in this way at all is an indication of what was happening to our marriage before it was two years old, and may stand in for episodes, in England rather than Italy, which there is no need to recount. But on board the Ithaca, Penny was on her best behaviour; as these casual nautical assistants came and went during our wanderings, she did no more than contemplate them appreciatively from a deck chair. They repaid this attention liberally as they worked at the tiller or on the ropes, but without offensive boldness and without – so far as I could distinguish – making either Anderman or Tindale in the l
east cross.

  But despite this general propriety of overt behaviour it was all a little uncomfortable, nevertheless. I was relieved when, in due season, Penny grew tired of yachting, or of yachting under the inhibiting circumstances I have sketched.

  ‘I think,’ she said one evening as we sat on our diminutive terrace watching the sun go down behind Scala, ‘I’ll go and visit the Duthies. It’s a long time since I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Who are the Duthies?’

  ‘Darling, you must know the Duthies. They’re Scotch.’ Penny took an irritating pleasure in uttering small stupidities of this sort. At least I had come to find them irritating; no doubt they had charmed me at first. ‘I’ll send Cynthia a telegram in the morning. It will be a good idea, don’t you think?’