A Man of Genius (16 page)

20

S
he walked passed San Moisè towards San Luca near where she'd been sometimes to buy cheaper week-old vegetables for Sunday. She felt conspicuous. People were staring at her, as Giancarlo Scrittori had been too polite to do on their last meeting.

No Venetian signora would take so little care of appearance, let hair straggle from under a cap however sultry the day. Happily, Mrs Bigg-Staithe was no longer there to titter and turn away, for she'd long since travelled on to the more popular destinations of Florence and Rome, her spouse brimful of Robert's opinions.

She would pass as a local peasant if she weren't so clearly foreign. The bones of her skull, her hair, her browning but still pasty face, her manner of walking, everything screamed it. The hot summer had finally struck. So care did not seem so necessary to an Englishwoman. It was different for natives.

Her pupil had gone off laughing and smiling to the country house leaving the troubled Conte in the care of the useful Signora Zen, the toothless housekeeper, and the other servants. With the pretty girl had gone the contagion of beauty, the sense that it rubbed off – even if the mirror always told another tale. She would visit the house again when everyone came back after the sultry dog days – if she herself were still in Venice.

Even Giancarlo Scrittori had gone somewhere north in the mountains for a week or two. She missed him but was glad not to provoke his pity and relieved to see no more newspapers. She had no interest in England's shoddy affairs.

She'd crossed to the Piazza San Marco early on the Monday morning, long before the
poste restante
office at Palazzo Grimani could have opened.

She was not the only person to arrive early. People received bank drafts and promissory notes through the office as well as personal letters, and there was an air of anxiety among those who anticipated the opening.

While she waited, she strolled on through the small
campo
of San Luca into Campo San Paterian past Tommaso's shop, already welcoming business with its open door. The jacket she'd enjoyed buying there was now much worn but some cheap cotton muslin she'd had made up near Le Zitelle had been supplied by him after Giancarlo Scrittori had quietly explained her circumstances. It helped keep her cool in the stifling rooms.

At precisely the correct hour, to the surprise of the people waiting, the outer door of Palazzo Grimani was opened by a swarthy man – a Turk or Arab? She'd not seen him when she'd come later in the day. He asked each person's business in guttural Italian, then silently waved them on. A serious bustle agitated the air, and the faces of those who mounted and descended were preoccupied.

Despite her eagerness to know who'd sent her letter and what it imported, she was not the first on the stairs. Behind her as she went up sounded other footsteps. She calculated perhaps two men: there was no rustle of skirts and the tread was heavy. She was hot and held her breath as she ascended and listened.

By the time she reached the office she was gasping for breath. Happily the room was airy with good natural light. It fell on ledgers and inkstands, quills and papers, tied together in tape of different faded colours.

While her agitated breath became more regular she moved into line behind a squat elderly man and broad middle-aged woman sweating in tight purple bombazine. The latter was expostulating with the clerk. As far as Ann could make out, she was insisting there was a letter for her from her husband Signor Moro in Genoa enclosing a banker's draft; they must be hiding it. As her voice rose, another man
entered slowly from an interior room. He was flaxen-haired with chilly eyes, an optical glass hanging on a chain round his thin neck. The woman turned to him and began her tale again but more ingratiatingly, in lower pitch. Under the scrutiny of the blue eyes the words began to slow. Gradually they failed. The German, or Austrian, Ann supposed, then came round the counter and politely, firmly, moved with the woman towards the door. She appeared surprised but accepted, her anxiety as well as desire seemingly quenched by this authoritative show.

Just the elderly man, then it would be Ann's turn. She held back; it seemed an age till he stopped mumbling his business and a package was produced and signed for.

It was her moment. As she stepped forward to give her name and ask for her letter, she turned slightly, realising that the next client was not as thoughtful as she had been.

A man was standing too close. He was in line but courtesy demanded some distance even within the office, for transactions were often private and signatures guarded. She glanced at him, surprised. Though he was looking away, something about the shape of the head, the stance, the side of a moustache, she was not sure what, made her think of the man she'd wrongly supposed Giancarlo Scrittori's friend so many months before near the Gesuati. Perhaps it was his foreignness that was not quite the usual Austrian version and yet was not quite English or French, perhaps Dutch? It could, of course, quite easily be the same man, for in this small town foreigners did their business in only so many locations; the post office would surely be one of the main meeting places.

Perhaps he knew no better than to crowd a person, for he'd stood close to Giancarlo Scrittori on their first encounter. That was why she'd noticed him.

It was not sufficiently threatening to protest, just irritating enough for her a second time to raise her eyes towards his face then lower them to indicate displeasure. But he was still looking away and didn't catch her glance. She turned her attention back to the clerk.

She prepared to present her credentials as Ann St Clair but found
she had no need to say her name; the clerk, who'd recovered from his episode with the vociferous lady and been bored by the old man, was now offhand. Almost in silence he looked at the name on her papers, then ordered her to sign and pay her postage fee. She wanted to see the letter first, but had not the skill to argue. She leaned over the counter and signed where she was told.

Her heart beat in her ears as she took the letter.

Whoever had sent it, he or she was addressing her as what once she'd been, not what she pretended to be.

Her name Ann St Clair was followed by the address, the
poste restante
in Venice. The hand was unfamiliar, not Caroline's for sure. From notes she'd had to take to Mrs Graves, she'd come to know it. Like a person's voice, writing was not easy to forget, even after many years.

The letter was fat. Fat enough for a bank draft? A postmark, almost obliterated by some other stamp, told her that the letter had come from London, presumably a clerk at Dean & Munday's had addressed it – for they remained the most obvious senders.

Without looking at him further, she brushed past the man who was standing a little further away now. Perhaps he'd not realised his discourtesy. She went swiftly down the stairs.

Outside she leaned against a wall and felt the sun directly on her face. She opened the letter carefully so as not to tear any of its contents.

It was not from Dean & Munday.

To her surprise it had come from Moore & Stratton in the Strand. The sender was a Mr Laurence Holt. He wrote solely to enclose a second letter.

This one was smaller, the paper thinner and the hand spidery. It was addressed to Mademoiselle Ann St Clair at Moore & Stratton. For a moment she was too perplexed to act, then she began taking it apart. She had to be even more careful than with the original letter for she could expect much writing on the flaps. But, as she unfolded them, she saw they were empty. There was no further enclosure.

What she read in the middle of the opened paper was short and in stilted English, underneath a carefully printed Parisian address.

It said, ‘Mademoiselle Ann St Clair, your mother is very ill, soon to die. I wish you come before too late.' It was signed ‘A Friend'.

Her back was heavy against the wall. She felt a hard stone pushing into her skin through her muslin dress. She stood straight, then swayed a little and leaned back again.

How long did dying take? How long had the letter been waiting for her? She had not been to Palazzo Grimani for some time, and she'd not sent Signora Scorzeri's boy for over a fortnight. The letter could have been sitting in that office for many days.

‘I'd be dead for all you care,' she heard her mother say distinctly. She'd complained so often her complaint had ceased to impress her daughter. Was it true?

Had not Caroline said she died with Gilbert? Well, he and she had been there long after his death. Caroline's stories were the memories of Ann's childhood, much stronger than anything that had actually happened to her. If Caroline died in body, her words would still be left over. What death was now being proposed?

Caroline and Gilbert: her parents' narrated life washed over Ann like an immense red and yellow wave as she stood there on the hot stones of Venice. It obliterated closer time and space.

The music, the paintings in Vauxhall Gardens where he'd taken Caroline. He as the accepted lover and husband, yet all meetings as trysts. ‘You know,' and Caroline bending over the table to look right through her young daughter who was sullenly sitting opposite while her mother consumed her apple pudding, ‘you know, he knew my innermost thoughts and I of course knew his. He knew, oh I admit it, my melancholy tendency, my loneliness – for what thinking being is not alone . . . ? and he admired all of it, all of me. He could awaken me to such joy.'

Here was grown-up Ann leaning against a Venetian wall near Palazzo Grimani going back to Vauxhall which she was quite sure
she'd never visited, knowing it was far more distinct in her mind than the Accademia or Frari or anywhere else beside her now.

She propelled herself automatically through the dingy narrow
calli
round Palazzo Grimani and down towards the finer area of San Marco towards the
traghetto
that would take her over to La Giudecca. All the while Caroline in her head went on talking while her daughter clutched the letter that summoned up all this over-coloured memory.

‘Such sights as we saw together, the jewellery at Cox's museum, so costly, so glittering, the silver and gold tiger, yes life-sized, the curiosities of Montagu House, the silver swan that could incline its silver neck and pull out a silver fish from the glassy shifting water. Imagine that! And Gilbert, dear Gilbert with only eyes for me and caring nothing for such a mélange – he used the word – bought me a bright silver, gold and crystal pendant.'

‘So where is it?' child Ann had asked.

‘One loses even one's most valued possessions.'

She believed in the absent pendant, just as she believed in the thin sliced ham at Vauxhall.

Only once when younger, much younger than thirteen, perhaps ten, though already a reader of stories and already suspicious, she'd asked if Caroline loved Gilbert.

‘Ah,' said Caroline, ‘I loved and what is most wondrous, he accepted my love. He was so grateful for it. When I brought myself to admit it, he took me in his arms and said that he knew I had risked so much by loving, for most people resisted the great happiness of love. I did it willingly.'

‘Was that because you were so old?' asked Ann for she'd not failed to notice her mother was more ancient than the mamas of other girls at school.

Caroline had boxed her ears so that they tingled even when she lay on her back in bed.

The memories, the ridiculous wordy memories – that sliced ham, that swan, the tiger, the gold, silver and crystal pendant – began to
subside only as she crossed over the canals in La Giudecca towards the apartment. What of all this
could
die?

Without much desire to see her mother, she would travel to Paris – realising now that she and Robert had passed through the city the year before without knowing that Caroline was living there. She was going in response to that conventionality of which Robert had so often accused her.

Of course here was, too, the escape she'd longed for. But she'd go resenting him and resenting the time away from him.

He would say he was glad she was going, he would be free of her clinging – love, he supposed she called it. He would not mind if she did not come back.

She would smile a bitter smile. But she would return. She had to. She would not abandon a part of herself.

When she'd entered the apartment and knocked on the open door of his study she'd told him her news. It was then out of sheer weakness and fatigue that she fell on to a chair in the sitting room and sobbed. He slammed the door from the study not to hear the noise. She carried on long after the emotion that brought it on had ceased.

21

S
he enquired about tickets and bookings from the few offices still open in the heat-racked town and requested a pass for travel to France. Everything took time.

She must use the interval to find them lodgings out of Venice, somewhere where the water didn't stink in the high heat and the rooms were cheaper. Without her in this city Robert would fall even further into debt: he had no notion how to rein in expense.

When she was gone he might leave and live somewhere else: he might not be there when she returned. He might not. And she would not know where he had gone.

Then she would not be free of him – that was a hopeless dream – for she would spend her days imagining him sitting, smoking, talking, drinking, becoming again for someone else all those people he had lost. A Bianca? The idea, so tenacious, could still kindle that passionate anguish that surely by now should have been cold dead, not just resting.

She trusted Tommaso for, when she'd come to buy his cheap muslin, he'd not urged her into anything more costly. He was from outside Venice and might be able to suggest other nearby towns where she and Robert could live more cheaply.

Padua, he'd said at once. The place was full of students. They didn't want expensive rooms. He'd heard she taught English to the Savelli Signorina; she might find pupils there among the young men.

If they moved she'd have to give up her lessons with Beatrice. No Padovan student could mean as much to her as this young girl. Her
heart felt heavy at the idea of losing her company – at starting over, and being still with him. Yet Beatrice had hidden something from her she should have known.

She determined on the visit. If they liked the town they could move and start over again.

Perhaps Robert would grow calmer. Perhaps some of the savagery had come from the Savelli influence. Perhaps in a new place he might be renewed. Perhaps he could work his charm once more and gain them some more credit. Perhaps.

She doubted all of it. Since the departure of the Bigg-Staithes, he'd made less effort in his manner and dress. Signor Balbi was not a poor man but he was a traveller and was not arrayed so finely as his fellow citizens: sometimes he appeared shabbily clad, so perhaps he noticed less. But surely even he had seen the change in Robert.

His paunch was smaller, no longer firm – she supposed it was because he drank more than he ate. The bald part of his head looked unpolished, and his tawny hair once so cared for round the rim was now too long. It made him seem an old man – or a mangy dog.

She pretended they were going to Padua to see art as well as find other lodgings. But as usual he showed no interest. The glories of Venice had not awakened him; he anticipated no more pleasure from old art in more decrepit towns. But Signor Balbi had said he should visit Padua, he had relatives at the university there whom his friend might like to meet, and Robert remained polite in his response to him.

Giancarlo Scrittori had once said they must see the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. Like Robert she felt beyond looking at painting, but there might be something comforting about a quiet Virgin well executed. And Christ? There was only one passion in his life – and it was all over quite quickly. Then what rewards! She had less time for Christ.

From Mestre they travelled in a closed public carriage, early because the heat was already mounting. It hardly went down even at night but still the early morning was the best. Other passengers smelled worse than their hens trussed up and shitting into a basket under the seat.

And what did they themselves smell like by now? They were so far apart and yet they must smell the same, two English strangers fed on foreign food.

When they arrived in Padua they found the door to the chapel with the frescoes firmly closed. A sign declared the doorkeeper away on a private
festa
. A few other people stood outside as well, disappointed by the closure, a couple with a child, the woman in a close bonnet despite the warm day, some young Germans – brothers perhaps – with a squat clerical tutor. All of them waited irresolute as if they expected the doorman to return despite his notice.

While they stood there, another foreign visitor walked up, a tall middle-aged man with a trimmed beard, moustache and tightly curled brown hair thinning at the temples. He looked at Robert and Ann because, she first thought, he too was English. But he did not speak to them. This was a blessing, since Robert was in such a painful, smouldering mood he would have found casual talk impossible. He'd taken the journey badly.

The stranger was familiar – but she was unsure of her judgement. She'd thought the man with Giancarlo Scrittori was the same as the person in the post office. Now she thought again that this was the same man. That the first two figures were the same was possible. That all three were the same was improbable. Surely the man before her was neater than the cloaked figure near Giancarlo. But he was very like the man at Palazzo Grimani who'd stood too close to her and whom she'd seen a little more distinctly.

Most probably her eyes were playing tricks. Was everyone already falling into types in the way old people saw them, indistinguishable from each other across time or place?

The German youths were expostulating with their tutor and each other, uncertain what to do next but eager to be off somewhere. Robert started to move away, Ann followed.

They walked through the town, decaying picturesquely in the sun. It lit up the once magnificent porticoes, sagging in front of dilapidated buildings. They passed by the flower market, selling tall closed blooms she didn't recognise and little bouquets bound in pink ribbon.

A smell of newly made bread floated on the air. On the stalls were pastries in different shapes and small cakes covered in sugar. Rows of crudely painted earthenware pots stood on trestles, with gaudy glass ornaments from Murano. How Robert used to cherish cups and bowls, handling them as a connoisseur! All in another life, another world of tea parties with Mary Davies and Richard Perry, of coffee and pots of ale with Frederick Curran and other rollicking friends in Cheapside.

She tried to hurry them past the stalls since they had so little money to squander. He might spy some flowers and be tempted to buy.

She need not have feared for he seemed in a daze. The beggars, who usually claimed his attention, pleaded and tugged at his jacket in vain.

Yet he did not walk at his natural quick pace but sauntered. She wanted time to check the places Tommaso had suggested. She'd not stressed cheapness when she'd enquired about lodgings but she doubted either he or Giancarlo Scrittori, whom she'd earlier questioned, were much deceived about the state of things. The change from the
turquois
jacket to cheap imitation Indian muslin told its tale. Such places as Tommaso recommended would be on the periphery, beyond the grassy spaces. They must leave time to visit.

Robert was not to be hurried. He gestured annoyance when she tried to urge him on by taking his arm. He tugged it out of her grasp. Then abruptly and for no reason she could see he sped up. She had to scurry behind him.

They were now passing the cathedral, an ugly plain facade before an open square. Meaning to visit briefly, they found themselves instead through a thick velvet curtain in the baptistery. Robert carelessly handed over coins to a sacristan. She wondered how many but dared not ask. A few candles were already alight in the gloom. The sacristan added another.

They had entered a different world, marvellous, crude and ridiculous. She looked around, then at Robert, expecting him to register contempt.

‘Giusto de'Menabuoi,' said the sacristan. Ann had never heard of him, Robert didn't listen. She swivelled her head round the sides, then wished to flee from what she saw.

To her surprise Robert didn't turn away and scoff. He appeared enthralled by the deranged and whirling vision covering all four sides: an apocalypse, a revelation of Revelation. She felt danger at once. This rapt attention couldn't be good. His nerves were strung so tight they must surely slacken or break. She remembered Tophet.

She followed the channel of his eye. There was a leopard with seven snaking heads emerging from it. Why this confusing of forms, this mixture of reptile and mammal? Why had the painter not made the whole monster scaly like a snake or crocodile? It wasn't disturbing, just absurd. Perhaps it was biblical; she knew her ignorance.

She moved away to glance at a demanding Christ, one whose glaring expression proved him aware of the trouble he was already causing and would go on causing. She continued her tour, staring briefly at the hundreds of ranged male and female saints paying court to something or someone, the Madonna perhaps, it was unclear.

All the while Robert remained transfixed before the revelation. She returned to him, eager to persuade him to leave. The frescoes were perhaps more interesting than she'd first thought – but she'd had enough.

‘It is blasphemy,' he said in a hoarse voice. He was looking at bishops' mitres on the heads of beasts.

‘Symbols of power, that's all,' she said.

‘Not that.' He glared at her incomprehension. ‘No, the blasphemy is the whole thing. It's against reason.'

She was aware of a figure in the shadows. A light from the few candles the sacristan had lit now let her catch the glint in the eyes of a man who was looking at her and Robert rather than at the pictures. It was the stranger whose stare she'd caught outside the Giotto chapel, the foreigner she kept seeing, or imagined seeing.

Such recognising, real or mistaken, was a gothic trick she often used in her novels, putting her mysterious characters over and over again in dim churches and on misty mountains and in caverns,
showing up, pop, like a jack-in-the-box whenever the plot required them, then spiriting them away when they'd served their turn. Her mind must be infected.

Yet the stranger really was staring, surreptitiously perhaps but definitely, and she was sure she discerned in the flickering light that distinctive almost imperceptible moustache and small beard. He stayed in the dimmest part of the chapel. Could she trust her senses?

What could he be about? It was no surprise that foreign visitors to Padua or any other Italian city should go to see similar sights. One would expect to find the touring traveller, guidebook in hand, in front of each Titian or Giotto, trooping from one masterpiece to the other before heading home with relief to tell his tale and hang his copies on the mansion wall. Nothing strange therefore in meeting the same man at different shrines.

And yet she and Robert had come reasonably fast from one chapel to another, and they'd not paused to look at the flower stalls. It was curious that anyone else would take the same route or be so insensitive to the unison of light and smell – would have come straight through the market to arrive here at exactly the same time.

Still, here the stranger indubitably was – she was now sure of it though he was still lurking in the dimmest corner where a candle hardly shone on the painted wall. It was silly to be jumpy. She'd thought at once about what they owed Signora Scorzeri. But that was crazy thinking. No one would have travelled all the way from Venice to Padua for the sake of hounding them for debts that couldn't have been worth such trouble. Certainly not a stranger. Had Robert really offended ‘authorities'? Was there something in his past that justified his occasional furtive looks into dark corners?

It was dim in the baptistery, yet the stranger's fair colouring showed in the wavering candlelight. The man could be Austrian or German, there were many about in northern Italy – and yet, she thought again, there was something different in him that argued against this.

If he were indeed interested in her and Robert, it would perhaps be in part because he'd heard her voice in front of the Giotto chapel
or in Palazzo Grimani. This would argue him English after all and perhaps in need of English company. But he had been here a long time already. That is if she were right in her sightings and not being madly suspicious. In which case, he could have made himself known before. From even the little she'd seen of him he didn't seem a diffident man.

No good explanation sprang to mind, but she remained convinced he'd been listening to them earlier: he had had the look of someone who understood what they were saying.

She'd no more time for pondering the mystery, for Robert once more dominated her mind.

She went up to him and touched his arm. ‘Shall we go? We have quite a bit to do.'

He shook her off roughly, then turned to stare at her with eyes full of blazing hate.

She took a step back. His looks had almost the same violence as his physical assaults, eye and fist equally powerful.

Again the self-questioning. Why was she here in this dreadful place instead of on the road to Paris with or without a pass? What was the hold of this incubus over her?

Or was there no need for one: was she spoilt for ordinary life now? Did she not need Robert as an addict needs opium, a drunkard his killing brandy?

She walked away to gaze at the large figure in heaven. In her disordered state she could read meanings everywhere. The seated man with the burning eyes huge and majestic in the midst of a circle of little people. If he had been fairer and balder, he could have been Robert. How mad a thought was this! Supporting this immense figure, this rampant potent man, was a serene blue-clad Virgin.

That is what Robert had needed, the virginal mother, large enough to lean on, calm enough to rely on always, but quite secondary, totally enclosed in the majestic circle of his divinity, his genius.

She moved on, trying hard to stop her mind allowing such imaginings. There were simply biblical stories told in pictures. She'd been taught some of them in school but most by Martha in a rudimentary way; they weren't part of her as they were of Robert – and of Caroline, she supposed. She was glad for this escape at least.

Now she noted on the wall a whole procession of diminished women, a woman coming out of the man, a man with many wives, a man willing to sacrifice his son, asking no permission of the mother who'd borne him, a drunken man being copulated with and covered by his women. All these men, Joseph, Christ, Noah, the empty angels, all had piercing glittering eyes that followed the watcher. The Virgin's eyes followed no one outside her world. She had no need to look at others – for her man, her god, was above her.