The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I had no means of telling whether it would be a good idea, nor of finding out. I’d just learnt all I’d ever learn about the Duthies. Penny made a point of thus naming unknown persons when she was proposing emancipated absences of this sort. I don’t doubt that they existed, for she had a large acquaintance with people I’d never met. She simply judged it entertaining to lend them what air of unreality she could.

  ‘I’ll get some work done,’ I said, with perhaps unnecessary grimness.

  ‘Darling Dunks, you’ve been doing an awful lot of work. You must go off with Ulric and his off-white Rabbit. They’d simply love to make a voyage with you en garfon. Tremendously en garfon.’

  I hated routine camp remarks of this sort – the more so because I owned some skill in perpetrating them in dialogue. But what I said at once was ‘Very well, I will’. For Penny had extraordinary finesse in manipulating my responses. She remained curious about our friends down in Amalfi, and wanted further information. It would probably be forthcoming under the changed shipboard conditions she proposed. In fairness, it must be said that this indelicate inquisitiveness was something I had a share of myself. And a writer is licensed to peer around; indeed, he has a duty that way. Nevertheless, it was against my better judgement that I carried a suitcase across the gang-plank of the Ithaca a few days later. I was going to be, it seemed to me, what the Italians call a tero incomodo.

  And so it proved – since I was quickly made aware of how much Anderman had thought was owing to the presence of a lady on his yacht. Now decorum was off. He took it decently for granted that I had no active interest in the pursuits in hand – but equally, that I had this time come aboard as a man of the world prepared to take in his stride whatever blew around. This was fair, and if it cast me in the role of voyeur, it couldn’t be pretended I was such a fool as not to have asked for it. My situation was perhaps demeaning, but essentially it was harmless – particularly, I told myself, as I had no intention of sailing in the Ithaca again. And had this turned out to be the case all would have been well. But there were to be some further short trips in the yacht, and the last of them was to bring disaster.

  XIV

  Quis te, Palinure, deorum

  eripuit nobis medioque sub aequore mersit?

  dic age. namque rnihi, fallax baud ante repertus,

  hoc uno responso animum delusit Apollo . . .

  Anderman chanted these lines solemnly as we rounded Cape Palinuro by moonlight. For one who had put in much time at Cambridge practising for the mile he appeared to be reasonably grounded in the ancient languages. Hence, (I supposed) this Norman Douglas touch. It was a hot night, and our helmsman, a dreamy-looking lad called Gino, still wore only a pair of ragged shorts, so that over his slim torso reflected light from the moving waters was at play caressingly. He was a little too young, perhaps, to be Aeneas’ companion. But he would have made a creditable Trojan stripling, and was certainly with us on that account.

  ‘Have you ever gone in for any branch of archaeology?’ I asked, for no better reason than that Troy had been in my head.

  ‘You mean have I ever done a stroke of useful work in my life.’ Anderman laughed, softly. ‘I can’t say that I have, Pattullo.’ For some reason I hadn’t got on Christian name terms with Anderman, although Penny had done so. ‘Nor that I feel in the slightest degree guilty about a life of idleness.’

  ‘You’ve never done any gun-running, or set about liberating an oppressed country? You’d make a capital soldier of fortune.’

  ‘Ah, now you’re laughing at me. Am I to figure in a play?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘A presuming question. I apologise. But now it occurs to me that I do have a life’s work. I look after Henry.’

  ‘He needs looking after?’ Tindale was below, and certainly couldn’t hear this conversation. ‘Is he liable to be impetuous and indiscreet?’

  ‘You know very well that he isn’t. What he needs from time to time is a pull or shove. I had to yank him out of Oxford – a shocking place, if Cambridge is anything to go by. Don’t you think? Can you imagine yourself, Pattullo, willingly going back there?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ This notion amused me. ‘But I sometimes do in nightmares. I have to take some examination again.’

  ‘All life is an examination, according to the religiously inclined. And if the dogmas are in decay the ethos is still around. You have to go quite some way to get clear of it.’ Andaman’s glance had strayed to the stern of the yacht. ‘Gino wouldn’t subscribe to it. But to return to Henry. There’s a touch of the frustrate ghost about him.’

  ‘And of the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin?’

  ‘That last has always struck me as an ambiguous expression. But, in general, yes. And he’s not a happy man.’ Anderman paused and again looked at Gino, but, this time, absently. I realised that he was now talking quite seriously. ‘I’ve tried to make a pagan of him, but it hasn’t come off. I don’t know why. Plenty of his mouldy old popes were as pagan as they come.’

  ‘Not in Henry’s period, perhaps. Zosimus and his contemporaries were too near the real thing.’

  ‘Perhaps so. Henry would have done better to have a go at the Borgias. Gino, vai aWoral. ‘

  This sudden instruction – concerned with I don’t know what point of good seamanship – had to be followed by others, and I hoped that Anderman’s anatomy of his friend would be broken off. He returned to it, however, a few minutes later.

  ‘Henry’s a nympholept. Wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Hardly precisely that.’

  ‘Well, that general notion. The unattainable ideal, and so on. The quest of the supersensible, and the dream of experience released from the bondage of the flesh. Oh, idle aspiration! Can I go down and get you a cigar?’ Anderman was on his feet as he spoke; he was invariably the punctilious host.

  ‘I don’t think so – thank you very much.’ Gino, I noticed, had a packet of cigarettes beside him. They were probably part of his tariff. I felt yet more indisposed to discuss Tindale with Sir Ulric Anderman. Although I had exclaimed in a facile way against Oxford there was college loyalty at the bottom of this. Tindale had been an accepted if very minor fact of life on Surrey Four: a dim decent donnish man, unfortunate in being attracted to youths who for the most part weren’t in the least attracted to him. He hadn’t perhaps been, like Arnold Lempriere (then unknown to us), a strictly non-playing member of his club. But he had managed to lead a useful and orderly life – Zosimus helping him along – and if his reserve had been of a nervous order, he had maintained some dignity behind it. Many men had made themselves distinguished university careers under such conditions: for example, the poet Thomas Gray. But now Tindale was committed to aimlesscourses and to practices which brought him no happiness and which he may even have struggled against as sin.

  I felt ashamed of once having rather disliked the White Rabbit. It had been for the snobbish reason that his manners were uncertain, and for the puritanical one that his glance used to stray fleetingly to my floppy hair. Perhaps I ought now to concern myself with not rather disliking his friend. In ‘yanking’ him out of Oxford (if that had really been the way of it), Anderman had probably acted with the best intentions; his conduct certainly had been disinterested, since he was a wealthier man than Tindale by a long way and owned no impulse to go to bed with him.

  ‘Have you always got on well together?’ I asked.

  ‘Henry and myself? Oh, well enough. A joint household has its practical advantages. Of course we don’t lurk in one another’s pocket. And when I speak of looking after Henry I’m not referring to a full-time job. When he goes swimming – you’ll have noticed he’s fond of swimming – I don’t sit worrying about whether he’s been drowned.’

  I was silent before this disclaimer. It seemed to be prompted by a certain honesty that Anderman commonly commanded; he was saying, in effect, that no depth of friendship was in question between Tindale and himself. I had met such deep friendships: a couple of
bachelors, or a couple of spinsters, important to one another in a totally unerotic way. But here on board the Ithaca with me, were two lonely men. Anderman could take it; he was the type of hedonist who can make do without whole areas of common human relationship. Tindale was perhaps another matter.

  Presently we turned in – something which on the Ithaca meant the gaining of an agreeable privacy. There were three cabins: one fore and two amidships. The crew, when there was one, curled up in sleeping-bags in the stern. Or sometimes they did this. On the present cruise, I had learnt not to do much prowling in the night.

  Frediano turned up on us almost at our planned farthest out. It was at a little port somewhere south of Paola, crushed between the sea and abrupdy rising mountains the savagery of which made our familiar Costiera Amalfitana seem tame. Or it ought to have been a little port. In fact, it was in process of horribly transforming itself into something different: a marina in the emerging sense of that beautiful word, backed by chunky concrete hotels. It was a dire metamorphosis which the picturesque traveller was getting used to even farther south than this, although he could as yet scarcely have foreseen the extent to which the entire region would be ‘opened up’ as the Autostrada del Sole pressed resistlessly on towards Sicily.

  Frediano was helping to build the marina, which we had gone on shore to inspect. Our first glimpse of him was with some appropriateness sheerly physical, being of straining buttocks tightly sheathed in faded levis (a species of garment which, was then moving with the motor-way towards the sun) and a rippling spine glinting with sweat. He had just heaved an enormous boulder triumphantly into place, and now he straightened up and turned at our approach. He was smothered in the fine white dust which the building operation caused to hang like a cloud over the scene – so that whereas most youths of his sort suggested (as I have recorded), some Graeco-Roman bronze rescued from the sea-bed, his own momentary note was of marble similarly retrieved. Sizing us up, he instantly smiled. The statue vanished and we were at gaze with one more modern Italian boy.

  There would be no point in enthusing over Frediano. He was a fisherman’s son from a place called Campora S. Giovanni, and had been at sea since childhood. Now (and with all his fingers still intact) he was earning better money constructing this basin for fleets of pleasure-craft yet unlaunched. He was very good-looking indeed, and very perfectly framed. I was to judge him rather intelligent and as possessing more than an average share of the elusive quality we call sensibility. All this added up to quite an endowment, no doubt, and I could see that Frediano was, in a simple phrase, better value than any such youth we had run into so far. Yet he was fundamentally as the others were: a venal and ignorant lad, unlikely to arouse in anybody anything other than a very specific form of desire. So I was unprepared for the strange sequel to this encounter.

  Anderman conversed with Frediano on the quay, and at once with the assumption that he might be looking for a change of casual employment. He asked him his name, his age, his sailing experience, looking him up and down the while with an arrogant openness of intent. The levis represented every stitch Frediano wore, and it wasn’t to be doubted that in imagination Anderman was removing them inch by voluptuous inch, and presently passing a notional tape-measure round naked hips. Frediano wasn’t discomposed; he had been in this situation before. But did I see him faintly smile; almost imperceptibly – yet with an arrogance of his own – shake his head? I can’t be certain. Looking back, one easily fancies such things. Frediano may have been in some ways a choosey, even a fastidious, youth. There is nothing in the rest of his story to negative this.

  Not being much pleased with Anderman’s performance, I moved aside with Tindale. Tindale was thus withdrawing, it was to be supposed, to make his own observations of Frediano from a discreet remove. In Oxford, he had never been one for bold appraisals, and he had taken his old habits with him into his expatriate life. On the present voyage, and without a lady on board, a certain frankness about my companions’ behaviour, even if it didn’t in set terms declare itself, seeped into the general atmosphere. But Tindale remained kittle and cautious. It may almost be said that he never looked at one of those accessible boys unless the boy wasn’t looking at him – and unless he thought I wasn’t either. Nothing had made me more doubt the good sense of my coming on the trip than the particular discomfort I seemed to occasion him at such moments. It was natural that he should hate the bobbing up out of his academic past even of an uncensorious and circumspect witness to his present way of life.

  Wariness is catching, and it was covertly that I glanced at Tindale now. I expected him to be taking in Frediano only, as it were, by snatches and amid much appearance of interest in barrows, cranes, lorries, concrete-mixers and similar miscellaneous evidences of the enterprise going forward.

  But it wasn’t so. He was looking at the youth openly, steadily, and gravely. And Frediano, although still answering Anderman’s questions, was looking back at Tindale in a very similar way.

  We sailed that afternoon for Tropea, with Frediano and Gino on board. Frediano, unlike two or three of his predecessors, made no immediate attempt to please. On the contrary, he was rather withdrawn. If I am right about his intelligence, he may already have been reflecting upon an unfamiliar situation.

  Anderman made no attempt to draw him out, or to disturb him in any way. Indeed, for the rest of the voyage he seldom addressed Frediano except with some brisk but polite order about the yacht, apart from this paying little attention to him at all. Crudely expressed, he had shoved the boy into his levis again and forgotten about him. There must have been some clear understanding between my two companions in these matters. Frediano belonged to Tindale.

  Only he didn’t. Or if he did, it was in the sense that Islay or Tiree belonged to my father: as sensible objects which, if contemplated aright, will reveal supersensible things. This may have been only the first stage in a developing relationship, but that it alone existed for a time I have no doubt whatever. Tindale had looked at this only slightly out-of-the-ordinary youth and said: ‘This is it, this is it at last’ – without, perhaps, clearly holding in focus what ‘it’ was. But the interval in which he was thus meditating was one of very calm inner weather.

  This last point struck me most of all. During our cruise, and to a lesser extent during the previous cruises, there had been sufficient opportunity to observe Tindale living alike in the prospect and the immediate recollection of his closer approaches to young men. What, if anything, these came to I don’t know, and it scarcely matters. The significant point is that the ghost was not merely frustrate, as Anderman had asserted; it was agitated, anxious, depressed as well. But now his entire comportment had changed. He sat on a deck-chair for hours on end – blamelessly, as Penny had done, but contemplating not several personable youths, but Frediano alone. Once or twice, catching my glance on him, he made a small unembarrassed gesture – much as if he were saying: ‘Isn’t the lad quite delightful? I can scarcely take my eyes from him!’

  It was very odd. ‘Infatuation’ wasn’t the word for it. Nor did it answer to my sense of the early stages, the prodromal period, of a love-affair. It was more like a release from bondage: that, and the discovery of something thought lost. I woke up one night asking myself whether Tindale believed that he had found a son. Even an actual, long-lost son – since this, after all, was a chronological possibility. But that, of course, was nonsense. The meagre Tindale would have had to espouse a high-ranking divinity if a young demi-god like Frediano was to result.

  I don’t imagine Frediano told himself he had found a father. He didn’t know what he’d found, and he was thoughtful, puzzled, bored – and perhaps conscious of a certain lack of occupation. He may, that is to say, have been piqued by what he judged an inexplicable backwardness on Tindale’s part. But, on the whole, I think not. There was a certain lack of grossness in Frediano which constituted one element in his charm.

  In one episode that might be termed gross, Frediano, however, was involved
. It happened at Palmi, where I had gone ashore with my two companions to seek various stores, and with the intention of lunching in a trattoria, known to Anderman, among the fisherman’s huts on the beach. This was to have taken us some time. But we found difficulty in securing fresh supplies of Butagaz without surrendering a couple of empty containers which we had thoughtlessly left on board. Tindale and I, therefore, returned to the Ithaca together to retrieve these heavy objects. The result was that we caught Frediano and Gino, not napping, but entertaining each other (in the mildest and laziest manner) to a bout of mutual masturbation. Aware of our presence, they were sufficiently considerate to roll over on their backs, put their hands behind their heads, and smile at us sleepily from the deck. They were thus behaving with decorum according to their lights, and they can scarcely have expected a row over what was their own leisure-time affair. But Tindale was more than outraged; he was profoundly shocked. For moments, indeed, his anger was paroxysmal. Had there been a rope’s end to hand, I believe he would have laid into both boys indifferently. Or perhaps only Gino would have suffered, as plainly the corrupter of Frediano’s youth. I wondered where Tindale had been to school, and also what repercussions would follow upon this absurd if painful affair. In the issue it proved not all that traumatic. Gino was impudent, and probably made a joke of it with Anderman. Frediano struck me as distressed; as not understanding what could be wrong, but as willing to defer to Tindale’s mysterious feelings in the matter. This was a sign of distinct good-will in him, and Tindale seized on it with pathetic – almost with ominous – speed. In no time, Frediano was being judged immaculate again. He was assuredly nothing of the kind. But I don’t to this day – curiously, as it may transpire – think particularly ill of him. Curiously, too, his great personal beauty comes back to me more and more. I even at times see him – vividly, and with no sense of resentment – in my dreams.