In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  ‘In vino veritas,’ he adds, approvingly.

  Talk picks up at our end about the conference, and then about Eliot herself. Marcia, who’s wearing a crocheted cream-coloured vest, so airily stitched that I can see her bra, says, ‘Oh! I have a problem with her, I really do.’

  ‘Do you,’ I say, with interest.

  ‘I do! She’s insufferable.’ Marcia looks exhilarated as she speaks. ‘Takes herself too seriously — and greedy. Too much appetite.’

  ‘That’s my feeling too,’ says Bruno. ‘There’s something off about her.’

  I drink my white. ‘No, no, she was so brave. She was terrified of what people would think. But first she lives with Lewes, then she married Cross.’

  ‘But Cross was gay!’ cries Marcia.

  The talk continues, but I’m not listening. I’m thinking about Eliot, doing something that she knew would make people dislike her, or feel disillusioned with her. But she did want to enjoy life; and it did take courage. At the other end of the table is Hans. I’m looking at him and considering.

  I think it’s then that I decide. The seat is empty beside Hans just now; someone has perhaps only temporarily left it — but without more ado, I walk over, sit beside him.

  ‘Well, hello,’ he says.

  ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘So I’ll see you in London.’ My voice isn’t very steady. I think I can read his face.

  ‘You will,’ he says.

  ***

  It’s time to go. Hands are shaken, cheeks kissed, goodbyes said. Everyone is going to catch a plane later. Hans and I step out of the Ca’Foscari. It has been raining all morning, and it is still raining.

  ‘It’s flooding,’ says Hans, calmly.

  He is right. The sky is a thick, pale grey, the rain steady, the wind warm. And I can see, below the steps of the entrance, on the pavement between here and the canal, water — about two inches. Hans looks down dubiously at his tennis shoes. Boards have been erected on the nearby quayside.

  I say goodbye to Hans quickly, we hug for a moment. I will see him at the airport later today. But before then there’s something I want to do. There is a Carpaccio Eliot wanted to look at, for which the painter Bunney arranged a special viewing, which she didn’t get to see; but there’s also a second one she did see, vaunted by Ruskin, a St George and the Dragon. I want to look at it myself.

  I walk fast — as fast as I can. But arriving at St Mark’s, the entire square is now covered with an inch of water. I walk to the northeast corner of it, hardly looking at the fairy palace. My feet in their shoes are sloshing through water, the air is weirdly warm yet rainy.

  I spend time in the church, dark, cool, smelling of incense, looking at the St George and the Dragon, the moment of confrontation. I try to see what Ruskin was talking about, which is what Eliot would have been seeking, I think.

  Coming outside back into the light, I turn left, but the street is a cul de sac, and I am obliged to go back. After that I try to head south, but soon stop for an espresso, to look again at Google Maps, as I realise I’m lost. I can see the hovering little blue shimmer indicating where I am, but it makes no sense. I turn my phone upside down, squint at it. Outside it is still raining, the sky still soft, pale grey, but the air has a noticeably cooler tinge. I determine to use the phone as a compass, go southwest. But each time I try to go in that direction, the canals seem to be thwarting me — suddenly there is no street in the direction I want, only a canal, with a bridge further up, and after that I can’t work out the best route. The flood water, I realise, is rising. People are erecting more boards on metal scaffolding. The boards are about two feet high, I calculate. I hit dry streets where I can walk fast again. Then, drawing closer to the lagoon, it is back to wading. The water is even higher.

  So Venice is flooding. Everywhere shops are closing, I look in as I pass, and see surreal spectacles: shops, with water nearly two feet high, people rapidly removing goods from lower shelves, transferring them to higher shelves.

  I remember now the remarks of the waiter at breakfast about flooding. I had taken no notice, as the receptionist dismissed it as a rumour, saying not in June. Now water has splashed up my dress, the bottom half of my dress is in fact soaked, and the wading is increasingly slow. There is a smell everywhere that is new. I know the Venice smell but this is concentrated, more obvious. By the time I am back at St Mark’s, the water has risen from two inches, to knee height.

  St Mark’s is a swimming pool. People queuing for the Doge’s Palace are being corralled into lines in the water. How strange. Everywhere now people are wearing turquoise galoshes over shoes, a cord fastening under the knee. Magically, black wellingtons also appear. Then I see the vendors.

  Slowly I go west, get to the bridge. Approaching my hotel, I take out my phone: missed calls and messages from Hans. I need, he says, to book a flight the next day, there is a room at his hotel, Pensione Wildner. What is he talking about?

  The lobby is packed with people and their bags. A crowd has gathered around the reception desk, there is no queue. I tap the woman in front of me, she turns round. ‘There are no more rooms,’ she says. Everyone is trying to speak to the receptionist. A baby is crying. I ring Hans. The vaporettos are not running, he says, the water is too high. You can’t get a water taxi now, they’re gone. There is no way you will make the flight. He has booked a room in his pensione, but they are going fast. He would bet the Accademia doesn’t have anything now, and of course he is right.

  ***

  I have nothing to wear for these flooded streets. I put on my soaked, wet sandals again, ignoring the smell. I pay, leave, and as soon as I’m outside, see that I can’t possibly wheel my suitcase. I will have to hold it up. The water is everywhere; only the bridges are exempt.

  Hans is waiting for me in the colonnades at the west end of St Mark’s Square, a tall figure with straw fair hair plastered to his head. ‘Look at your feet!’ he says.

  ‘It’s extraordinary —’

  ‘It is extraordinary,’ he says. ‘It’s happened so fast.’ He takes my case.

  The police are moving people out of St Mark’s, cordoning it off. Their costumes and boots are immaculate. We walk away from the square, down towards the lagoon by a back street that is also two feet high in water. Everyone is holding their suitcases as best they can, some above their heads. Gradually, we come to the quayside in front of the doge’s palace. The lagoon — I stop for a moment to look at it. It looks strange and wild, choppy and out of control. There is nothing to mark the point at which it ends and the quayside begins — the Adriatic sea is flowing right over the city, straight over St Mark’s.

  Hans’ trousers are dark up past his knees, soaked by the water. We wade, pushing our legs through the knee-high water, in which I can feel the current of the sea. The wind is stronger than before, all the awnings are flapping. It’s the north African wind, Hans says in a loud voice so I can hear him. I am glad to be with him. People are thinning out now. ‘That’s it,’ he says, indicating the Pensione. It is small, with a glass-cased restaurant at the front, but as we draw near I see chairs on tables, everything is stacked on tables and counters, there is two feet of water inside it, people are busy with buckets and wellingtons. The entrance is next to the restaurant. The reception area is flooded like the restaurant, so is the kitchen, the calm receptionist wears high waders, water covers even the first stair. I follow Hans up the narrow staircase. I am soaked and tired. It is modestly decorated, for a hotel that’s right on the lagoon. We leave the water behind, yet the stairs are filled with the peculiar sour-sweetish smell of the water of Venice. Up we go, four flights. We are breathless at the top. Hans opens the door, switches on the lights. The room is not large, but it has two windows directly onto the lagoon. Hans opens the shutters and the windows, immediately there is a violent rattling from the wind. But the colours. The colours are extraordinary: the air blue under the grey sky: the lagoon churned up
, the magical aqua-tinted water flecked with white. Right across the water is San Georgio. ‘It’s something,’ says Hans, coming to stand beside me. Then he turns and begins unzipping my rainjacket. ‘Hans,’ I say, he shakes his head and continues. I peel it off myself, my face is still damp from the rain. I put my arms round his neck and kiss him. This is the beginning of the end of the most confusing and beautiful day. And this I will not forget.

  ***

  It is dusk when I wake. Hans is closing the shutters; he switches on the lamp at the far side of the room. He asks me what I want to do, then he comes and sits beside me. I reach and touch his cheek with the back of my index finger. He kisses my finger. He says, doing a down-turning with his mouth, more peculiar things with his mouth, ‘I want to be with you.’ I see a stricken look on his face. ‘It doesn’t make sense otherwise. I’ve thought about it, over and over.’

  We go out to get supper, or rather, we go downstairs. The hotel manager shakes his head. ‘Non e permesso’, he says. It is not safe. Their own restaurant is officially closed, but the cook is managing to make a simple meal for three rooms now — a pasta — he can do the same for us. We say we want to go out. We ask the kitchen for bin bags, and we put one each round each leg, clumsily try to hold the bags tight.

  We step from the safe hotel, out into the wind. Outside it is eerie. There are hardly any people. It is dark, the awnings are whipping and flapping noisily in the great wind. We are wading through a low, windy sea at night, the water shining black here and there in the lamps. We go on wading. We will have supper together, somewhere will be open.

  4

  She could not pretend to understand it all.

  They were here in Venice, the city of water and light, and their adjoining rooms at the Hotel Europa, the Palazzo Giustinian, on the Grand Canal, were magnificent. The floors were of polished stone, a tapestry hung on Marian’s wall, the painted ceilings showing cherubs and gods. Johnny marvelled at the cunningly painted pottery rendition of St Mark’s Square that was beside his bed. Through the French doors, on the balcony, he saw light glitter.

  ‘Shall we try dining out, mia donna?’

  ‘I might be recognised.’

  By early evening, the waiter had laid the table in the apartment with the white cloth for dining, and a splendid supper of a barbarous-looking fish in a gleaming oily orange sauce was served. When it was cleared away, Johnny read Alfieri’s autobiography aloud in slow Italian, while Marian corrected him. They turned next to Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. The evening was darkening, a light wind was crossing the lagoon. Gently, Johnny said, ‘Dearest, would you prefer to be alone?’

  ‘Entirely as you please,’ she said. The idea of Johnny feeling conjugally obligated did not bear contemplation. She smiled. The man who would have been funny about this, of course, was George.

  Johnny said, ‘I will be alone, I think. My tiredness,’ — and he gestured. But in the night she became aware of being kissed and caressed, and she woke fully when Johnny pushed himself into her. In the morning, Johnny looked exhausted. Over breakfast he asked her, ‘I didn’t hurt you?’

  ‘You must rid yourself of this idea completely.’ She enquired after him with the same solicitousness.

  ‘The usual spot at the back of my head,’ he said, almost rudely. He retired for another hour to his own room, unusually shutting the double doors completely.

  Venice was splendid, the queen of cities. Ruskin was Marian’s guide, she had made it his, too. Over morning coffee, when Johnny had risen again, they watched as the sun struck the dome of Santa Maria della Salute opposite. The heat was already rising, a vaporous mist was on the water, a magical acquatint under the hot sky. They saw pictures in the Accademia: Mantegnas, Bellinis, Carpaccios. To travel anywhere was easy: waiting for them, always, was their gondolier, Corradini. Johnny had remarked to Marian on Corradini, whose smile was unreadable, and who had no top teeth. She had been surprised at the remark. ‘I have become too used to being your eyes,’ she joked. In reply, Johnny said that life through her eyes was a poem.

  The morning’s freshness was gone by noon. The sun was a white metallic pulse in the sky, the street reflected heat back into his face. Johnny was caught between sky and street. He had disloyal thoughts of an English summer day at Weybridge: temperate, shady cedars and small willows, the lawn mown, sweet to the spirit. Marian had quoted Homer’s anvil of the sun, and now he understood: the sky so louring, so actively productive of heat, as if a Vulcan lived above.

  ‘Shall we take the gondola?’ Johnny asked, polite. They had left the Accademia. He wanted so much to be on the water, his impatience felt desperate. But in the Piazza, Marian was reading the Ruskin pamphlet Johnny had got for her yesterday, and with that complete concentration, with which he was now so familiar, she nodded in his direction but did not lift her eyes. He must wait. The heat was making him faint, he could feel his heart speeding up, he put two discreet fingers to his pulse, he knew his own tendency. But it was in this blinding white heat that it occurred to Johnny that Marian was not all she seemed. He had heard her last night, a cry from the depths. He regretted going into her room, and his impulse to do so was now a mystery to him. Sweat was pooling under his arms and on his back. He would wash himself when they returned to the hotel. She said they needed refreshment, particularly Johnny. But she seemed not to have heard his suggestion of going on the water. ‘I would like to go on the gondola,’ he said again, in a slightly strangled voice. The effort involved, to control his sense of urgency, was excruciating. But they stayed in the piazza and had ice cream.

  Finally, they were on the water, Corradini steering them out onto the pale swell. ‘To feel the breeze is ecstasy,’ said Johnny. He put his hand to the back of his neck, then his palms out to feel the breeze. The breeze was taking the pain in his neck away. They were on the open lagoon. A wonderful, wide space of water under the sun: but it was marvellous! He was here, and she was Mrs Cross.

  ‘Where did you get the Ruskin guide from?’ she asked.

  ‘The man’s name is Bunney.’

  ***

  Later, Johnny went alone in search once more of John Wharlton Bunney, whom he had met the day before. He walked along the Zattere. St Mark’s Square on his left — St Mark’s Square, only one of the world’s glories! That was not a bad way of putting it. Dear God, on his right, the water of the lagoon, he had never seen such a colour. Riva degli Schiavone, keep going, diritto, perfetto. Per-fay-to, he enunciated. He put his hand to the back of his neck. Castello ahead. He tried to remember the night, but there was nothing where there should be a memory. Gone. He found the house. Mr Bunney, a painter, acted as an agent for Ruskin’s books and pamphlets, a sideline. Johnny would be curious to see him without a hat. Hats were sometimes worn for purposes of concealment.

  He hadn’t bargained for children. A maid and a child admitted him. The child, a red-head, or orange head, a gap between two teeth, stamped up the stairs ahead, lifting each sturdy-looking leg as it were burdensome, before, stamp! — ‘Are you a stranger?’

  ‘I am,’ said Johnny. You never could fool children. The gap between the child’s teeth looked dreadfully quaint.

  ‘Mr Cross.’

  ‘Mr Bunney.’

  He had forgotten how close-set Bunney’s eyes were, and the way his eyebrows slanted downwards above the asiatic eyes. He spoke like an Englishman. ‘You look like a regular painter,’ said Johnny, indicating Bunney’s overalls.

  ‘I am a regular painter.’

  The overall was pocked with colours: blue, yellow, red, every colour under the sun.

  ‘The sun is extraordinarily hot,’ said Johnny aloud. His shirt was sticking to his back. A baby was crying. ‘Mrs Bunney is out with Jack and Em,’ said Mr Bunney.

  ‘It’s not really a problem,’ said Johnny, meaning to be kind.

  Mr Bunney was walking down the corridor. They were up on the second floor, the large room h
ad three great windows, and easels. ‘Good God! you do a lot of painting.’

  He was crass. He was making Mr Bunney smile. Johnny spent an hour looking at the canvases. He thought they were subtle and atmospheric, and said so. ‘But really,’ added Johnny, ‘I am after Ruskin. I understand you have more pamphlets.’

  By the time he left he had pamphlets safe in his cotton bag. ‘Ruskin has been very good to me,’ confided the painter. ‘He is a fine, thoughtful man — a genius, in my view.’

  The word prompted Johnny to smile before he could stop himself. ‘Might I bring a lady-friend with me, to admire your pictures? Would that be possible?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I am sure she will be interested,’ said Johnny. He couldn’t damp down his own smirk, unfortunately. Not that he wanted to seem mysterious, or secretive. But what would Mr Bunney have said, if he knew that the lady in question was England’s greatest novelist? It was audacious, being in Venice incognito. No one had the smallest idea that she, his wife, was here; no idea at all. They took all their meals in their rooms; they did not go to St Mark’s Square to a cafe — she would be spotted before you had time to blink. They went to galleries, churches, or into silent green-water roads and alleys, navigating impossibly hairpin bends in the long black boat with velvet smoothness. Silent, between high walls, the dark water, the sun and shadow; the discreet sound of the long oar breaking the water’s surface, as round-shouldered Corradini pulled up and then pushed down, drawing them deeper and deeper into the secret Venice. It was hard to unite the two — the ravishments of the open lagoon and these secret, hot, silent alleys.

  ***

  Two days later, Johnny strolled with Marian along the Zattere, listening to the familiar sounds: the cries, the splashes, the birds, the low broad churning noise of the large ferry, that made a furrow in the water; the begging children that appeared in your gaze, looked directly into your eyes. It was only twenty minutes’ walk before they had reached the quayside Bunney home in Castello. ‘My wife, Mrs Cross,’ introduced Johnny. ‘Dear, this is Mr Bunney.’