A Man of Genius (9 page)

For the last stage in the mountains they took the early-morning charabanc shared with several passengers, mainly Germans. It was still expensive even then for there had to be guides, mules, riders, all needing to be paid, six livres here, nine there, divided out, but still.

Down and down they went, paying to have their trunks ransacked by guards at every stop, down through gorges into where vines were curiously trained from tree to tree. Robert continued gloomy. She felt little better, her female problems troubling her. It wasn't just strength that men had over women.

Italy at last – and the most rapacious customs men.

They had to stop longer than they wished in Milan to get their papers in order. Even she lacked much energy for sightseeing but out of habit she suggested the cathedral, open from sunrise to sunset according to the guidebook. He was uninterested. She proposed other churches, other palaces. He didn't care for tasteless extravagance, not for art as duty.

‘I am sick of travelling, let's just go to Venice, and finish the comedy.'

So they traipsed on through rice and grain fields and vineyards, through towns, some bustling, some deserted. She tried out the Italian learned from Signor Moretti and found that his Roman tongue was not currency here. Or perhaps he'd left so long ago he'd fallen behind the times. She couldn't easily catch the lilt that might have made her words intelligible. Robert picked up language to speak, but made little effort to understand.

Might he warm to these more vital people? Not even their courtly manners, the gentle bows and kisses of the hand, animated him, although he was not displeased to be treated with more ceremony.

They stopped in a small town by the Brenta, delayed yet again by something not quite right in their papers. He'd found an Englishman, no, an Irishman – dear God, an Irishman – and he was drinking wine with him. The Irishman said there was an English colony in Venice. It was a dismal place of shifting foreigners. He'd left it for good.

She doubted it was dismal. It glittered spectacularly in Mrs Radcliffe's novels. She tried to look forward to gliding down the Grand Canal to the shining sea even if she did it alone. Better if she did it alone.

The Irishman went on his way to Bologna. She'd caught sight of a picture of bare buttocks garishly tinted in pink and red, so assumed he dealt in unsavoury prints. He left Robert drunk and inflated with talk. When he got up he stumbled and fell on to her. She caught him, then fell herself.

‘See what you've made me do,' he said.

What was the matter with her that she put up with this, resented it and got back on her hind legs to beg again? Was female independence so ludicrous, so unnatural as cousin Sarah thought, that she was clinging to its opposite as to life itself?

Could she fear being alone in a foreign land? Doubtful, for she'd negotiated most of the journey and could do it again.

Best not think too much.

Venice

11

T
hey were on the sea in the dark for the final lap of the journey. A flickering lantern dangled and swayed from the prow of the boat. They were rowed past buildings: more like rocks untidy with undergrowth. They smelled of people, of human waste.

So this was it. Venice.

No one spoke. They entered a wide stretch of water. The Grand Canal?

The boatman glided to a dripping wooden post, then stopped. He leapt into the mist. The boat bobbed dangerously. He said something they didn't hear. Robert trembled with irritation.

‘What damned thing is he about now?' His face was turned to the bank.

The boatman came back with a girl muffled in a dark cloak. He dumped her on to the boat like a bundle of rags. ‘
Sorella
,' he muttered and took up the oar. The bundle twined round his leg.

They were out on open water again. Where could they be going? Across the Adriatic in a flimsy open boat? To meet Barbary pirates, Turkish corsairs?

They were too poor for kidnapping. Perhaps they were being returned to the mainland, the trip a paid-for manoeuvre to collect a droopy sweetheart.

After a few minutes, more dark houses loomed, with light flickering from them. Oil lamps yellowing the edges of shuttered windows? The boat glided down another, narrower stretch of water.

By now her eyes were used to the dark but she could still see little,
and the mist, though thinning, remained dense. The stench was strong, fishy, acrid, but less human. She tried but failed to close her nose. Some people could do that.

The boat – was this a gondola? She'd described their sleek glamour more than once but could this cramped shabby craft be one? – came softly to rest by stone steps. The water splashed over them trailing dark green fronds. She looked down. Only two large steps rose above the waterline, blackened by the green slime.

The boatman disentwined himself from the pile of girl's clothes, and gestured for them to get out. He wasted no words.

‘
Inglese
,' he'd said when they first boarded his craft, then spat. It surprised her. This easy hatred had been a French habit – explicable in France after Waterloo and its Emperor's humiliation. What had the English done to Venice?

She recalled Fred Curran's words: given Venice to the Austrians. Not England alone of course, but all the gangsters who carved up Europe after Napoleon's fall.

Probably it had nothing at all to do with politics; it was rather that they were strangers and not rich enough to be fleeced.

The boatman was rapping on the narrow door of a tall house. He left Robert and Ann to get out of the unstable boat as best they could. The girl appeared to be asleep in the scrambled cloth.

Robert clambered over the rim before she could warn him, slipped on the slimy step and fell, dirtying the green greatcoat that had stayed unharmed through half of Europe.

Hitching up her skirts she bent down, intending to kneel on the cold step. Even then the moving fronds nearly edged her off. Her stockings were thin and wet against her pressure. She struggled to pull herself up. The water sloshed against the stone slabs and went over her shoes. A rat plopped into the canal.

By the time they both stood on the pavement they could hear footsteps in the house.

A heavy woman in late middle age came to the door, pulling back a rusty bolt that screeched, then thudded into place. By her flickering
oil lamp she seemed even darker than the man in the boat. She said something in a harsh voice. This was not the language of Signor Moretti. A dialect, perhaps?

Signora Scorzeri looked at what the boatman had delivered. He picked up people, often foreigners, from Mestre on the mainland, and ferried them to her door – the last had been two giggling Frenchmen scarcely beyond twenty but with enough money to take her middle floor for the winter months, perhaps longer. She preferred foreigners: she could charge them more and they were less fussy about her cooking.

This couple was not prepossessing. Had they been dragged behind the boat? Yet there was something about the man. He bowed over her hand. She softened.

Then hardened. They'd arrived with no servant, not even a woman. Unusual for the English. What money could come from bedraggled people who kept no man or maid? A couple of trunks were being unloaded from the boat but there were no bandboxes, no parcels declaring the acquisitive traveller. What had such people to do here? Probably they were fleeing something.

She stared at them, narrowing her black pebbly eyes. She doubted they were married. They had a look about them.

Still, she would take them in – her top rooms had been empty these many months – and she signalled as much.

‘Names,' she said in heavily accented English. ‘Give names.'

‘Signor and Signora James, Anna and Roberto James,' said Ann.

‘Jamis,' said the woman.

‘James,' said Ann.

Anna and Roberto: they sounded operatic as Ann and Robert had once seemed romantic. Even as the falsehood was wearily repeated she liked to hear it.

The man bade no farewell to his passengers as he stepped back into the boat. Normally he informed the authorities of foreigners he ferried over from the mainland, but he doubted he'd bother in this
case. The
sorella
woke at his footfall and twisted herself upright like a growing vine round his torso, her head swathed in dark scarves.

They followed the
padrona
up sloping steps of damp uneven stone, leaving a ragged boy scarcely in his teens to carry up the trunks. At length they entered a large, piercingly cold room with a high ceiling crossed by dark, crudely cut wooden beams.

She'd thought Italy would be warm. Another lie of poetry and novels, the warm south that wasn't warm.

It was only November. It must get worse.

The woman had given up speaking Italian or, Ann supposed now, Venetian at them and simply gestured with a weary hand at the three rooms.

The bed was immense. It smelled musty. She felt her chest constrict. Robert disliked her weakness and would be especially morose if she complained. By hawking and coughing in the morning she could rid herself of the effects.

A big bed had one use. She could hug the far edge, not to avoid Robert's embraces – it was long since he'd offered those – but to get away from the loud snoring that shook his frame, increased, then ended in a start of wakefulness before the whole cycle began once more.

The soft blue silk scarf he'd bought her so long ago in London had during their long journey been folded into a cover for her ears. It slipped during the night and was no proof against the final crescendo when Robert lay sprawled on his back.

Tonight she was so tired she managed to fall into a dream-filled sleep even before she could put the blue scarf in place.

A few hours later both were awake and in the sitting room. Robert had opened the shutters on a silvery-grey, less misty morning. He was standing at the window letting in the colder air with its smell of seaweed and salt. The sound of water banging on stone and wood entered the room. It made it seem part of the wet workaday world. Robert responded. ‘Perhaps here I might do something.'

‘Of course,' she said, trying to catch her breath. Her chest was still full of bad musty air.

He went into the small adjoining room which they both assumed he'd take for his writing. He came back: ‘But coffee, coffee.'

Coffee cost money. Each chocolate drunk, each tea and glass of wine delivered, each coffee taken stole from the bread and meat that were surely more essential. But she was not a demanding coffee drinker. He'd noted the fact back in London, touching her nose lightly with his forefinger before leaping off to find the drink without which he could not act, compose, even live. It should be taken in men's company.

He went out while she unpacked the few necessary items from the trunks, then as usual stored her hemp bundle under the bed. She hoped that Robert would find his coffee on this strip of island, wherever it was, and some men to drink it with. Else it would be a sorry homecoming.

When he returned she knew he'd drunk something, perhaps coffee, perhaps a stronger drink. She smelled rankness in the air from his breath.

‘It's all vegetable patches,' he said. ‘We're among peasants with hoes and chickens, clam fishers who crawl in the mud and scarcely bother with shoes and stockings.'

He went into the little study, sat down at a rickety table and brought out his travelling desk, his pens and ink and good paper.

She tiptoed in to remove the greatcoat from the high-backed chair on which he sat to smoke. She ought to work on the water stain from last night, then hang it freely to air. But she probably wouldn't. She often imagined domestic acts she had neither the patience nor skill to undertake. Still, it was better out of ‘his' room.

‘The weather is disgusting,' he said and turned to her with a weak smile.

He looked pale and still tired.

‘Just make a warmer sun,' she responded.

‘That's hardly the aim.' He paused, his face rippling a change of mood. ‘It's not some sort of gloomy vanity, you know.'

‘I know.'

She sensed the danger. He grunted, then poised his pen above the paper. She left the room and pulled the door to – gently and as far as it would go. There would always be a crack.

12

I
t was time to sort out how they would live here.

‘Here' being where exactly? An island near the Venice she'd seen in Signor Moretti's book. Probably the pictures were as misleading as the accounts of Italian weather.

She'd find out how much the surly
padrona
was going to charge for giving them bread and coffee in the morning and a little fish for dinner or tell where these things might be cheaply procured for her to cook. She would learn how the washing was to be done, how she was to exist as a woman with all a woman's wants. She went out to explore.

Moving, she felt warmer and, as she came from the narrow path by the side canal, she saw a wide stretch of water. The day had cleared and across the water to her right were the shapes she'd expected, the campanile, the colonnades and gothic windows of the Doge's Palace, the round solidity of Salute, Signor Moretti's woodcut pictures made stone.

The silver was now more intense and her spirits rose, as, just for a moment, she hoped Robert might find some peaceful energy and she enjoy a little tranquillity.

But wouldn't he discover it all a colossal cliché? Those so illustrated buildings? It was too contrived an ‘English' scene for any fragile imagination. She herself liked a cliché.

Pray God that other cliché, Lord Byron, had left his palazzo. Let him be gone with his entourage of monkeys and badgers and dogs and parrots and whores and infants – or whatever else the scandal sheets reported about his person – let him be gone far far away taking
his vulgar fame, his reproachful facility, his sneering pride out of Robert's dark orbit.

Though, truth be told, she herself would have relished a sight of him in his gondola with whore or bear. She wished she'd been in the English crowd watching Napoleon strut on the prison ship in Southampton before setting sail into exile.

No matter: little difference between remembering what you'd seen and remembering what you'd imagined seeing.

To her, Robert's imagination was now a physical body to be nurtured and cared for, like a difficult disturbed child. She'd intended to be its nurse and comforter; instead, in her darkest moment, she felt she'd become its dependent, a kind of parasite or tumour growing out of it. Caroline's moods inhabited the house, changing shape but always with a mouth that might at any moment cry out and demand the attention she could never adequately give. Nor
wanted
to give in that case.

There she'd be in her little attic room in the dark except for the single candle with which her cold fingers traced the words of the filched magazine, and Caroline would summon Martha to bring her at once to the warmer drawing room. Her mother would be sipping pale tea in impetuous need of an audience. Then Gilbert would emerge with all his knowledge and experience from Caroline's prodigious memory.

‘He travelled, girl, to see the habits, manners and customs of men. He spoke of France and Germany, but he knew of unseen places. He said' – and here Caroline leaned towards her bored young daughter – ‘that a Japanese, to vindicate his ruined honour, will murder himself; and his adversary, scorning to be less pure, will entreat him to live long enough to behold him follow the honourable example.'

‘How did my father die then?' said the child Ann.

Momentarily bewildered, her murky green eyes flashing, Caroline had barked at her to go away, to go now for she wanted rid of her there and then, shouting after her as she fled back upstairs, ‘It's not
for you to pry. He loved all things graceful, not wayward, girl, like you. He died as he lived, a gentleman.'

Her Italian was understood enough for Ann to discover most of what she needed – bread, fish, possibly where to get a little fruit from the few stalls along the
fondamenta
, the quayside of the main canal. They were set back in narrow, bent houses before little fields, patches rather, of artichokes and beans.

No one replied to her in Signor Moretti's tongue. Indeed they hardly replied in words at all but simply sat on benches and looked away when she accosted them. They were jovial enough with each other on this low-slung island as if they were all in families, which she supposed they were, all exchanging greetings, touchings, demands, courtesies. But the sociability didn't envelop the stranger, even a harmless smiling one as she supposed herself to be. She felt discouraged and disapproving.

She returned to the apartment with a few flat cakes, fishy biscuits and something like sardines in strands of vinegary cabbage. She couldn't imagine Robert eating this but it was all she could find on this first excursion, and it seemed a local food.

As she entered their rooms she knew something wasn't right. She braced herself.

Putting her eye to the crack along the door she saw he was pacing up and down his little study, talking to himself in splutters. From the smell oozing from the room she realised he'd lit one of the expensive cigars John Taylor had given him before they left England.

He didn't immediately come into the sitting room and when he did – to go down to the privy outside – he said nothing to her as he passed. He was holding the half-smoked cigar between the fingers of his left hand.

When he returned, she spoke. ‘Is it no good?' She couldn't help herself.

‘Of course it isn't. Did you think it would be?'

‘I suppose I hoped.'

Her body had tensed.

‘
You
hoped. But I'm not sure how much
you
care.' He stopped, put his cigar to his mouth and puffed. ‘I need peace, yes, and calm, but also good company, conversation, a place of ideas and ferment. Do you think I'll find it here among these water rats?' He gestured towards the window.

‘There must be other people,' she pursued. ‘We're not so far from the Grand Canal and the palazzi where foreigners, writers, interesting groups must congregate. There may be Venetians you could get to know.'

‘Venetians,' he spat out. ‘I don't think so. What have they ever produced? Dreary pictures of saints. No vision.'

‘You haven't looked at them.'

‘I didn't come here to stare at antiquated stuff. From the dead past. What has even Titian's work to do with me, with now? Damp, pockmarked. Look at this place.'

‘Let's take a boat over to St Mark's anyway and see the cathedral.'

‘Sightseeing' – he threw rather than flicked his ash across the room – ‘that's all you've wanted to do since we left England. You don't know a place by looking at what others tell you to see.'

‘We haven't seen anything yet.'

‘Stones, just stones, an empire of ruins. I will not live in a petrified world. It's in the mind things happen.' He jabbed at his head with his right forefinger.

The gesture reminded her of Caroline twirling hair round her little finger in jerks – like a small child, Ann had thought. She grimaced.

‘Oh yes, mock it. I know what you think of my work.'

‘It's not true, don't be so cruel.'

‘Don't start, don't be pathetic.'

He strode back into his study. She swallowed the tears and phlegm from the night in damp bedding, and felt a most comforting self-pity.

There was something about being alone, excluded, that was so familiar, so homely. ‘I never wanted you,' Caroline had said when in a pet. ‘And I never wanted you,' Ann had replied before fleeing upstairs. You knew where you were with someone like this.

Over the next days she wandered round the city, following hints from Nugent's guide. She looked foreign among the painted people. Their faces were not always masked as in pictures of Venice in Signor Moretti's book but invariably rouged and tinted as if to defeat the greyness of their weather. She liked looking at them; not so different from glancing at fashion plates in Caroline's magazines. If they noticed her, they'd have thought her frumpish.

Curiously there appeared little shame at surrender of a thousand-year republic. There was more bustle in triumphant London, more purposeful busyness. Yet here people in the piazza and
campi
, along the dingy
calli
and
rive
, went about their lives quite assured. As if this little provincial conquered town were the centre of the world. It was a great skill.

‘Signora,' said a voice, ‘I see from your small book of travel you speak English.'

She didn't hesitate. ‘Indeed, that's all I do. I thought I spoke a little Italian but time on La Giudecca has convinced me otherwise.'

She looked at the short, slightly built, clean-shaven and pleasing young man. A taller older one, fair with a faint moustache, possibly a small beard, was with him, close to his shoulder studying a newssheet. Only the younger one spoke.

‘Oh, those people do not talk Italian.' He laughed.

‘That I gather. But you speak very good English.'

‘I have been in London.' He held out his hand. ‘Giancarlo Scrittori.'

She took it. ‘Ann James, Signora Robert James.'

The young man came round so that the weak sun would not be in her eyes.

She glanced at the older man, now partially obscured by Signor Scrittori. He didn't speak and was not introduced; he made no move to push himself forward or to walk away but stood completely motionless, paper in hand.

Obviously they were not, after all, acquainted, for the younger man didn't look at him. Curious, for there was too little space between them for strangers.

She'd hoped there'd been two men – it would be more seemly to have a stray introduction within a group. A single man accosting a woman alone would not have been quite decorous in Holborn or Putney; she doubted it was so here.

‘I apologise for approaching you but I wish to help – this is my city – and to take an opportunity of practising my not so good English. I am wishing to start a trade with English people in things of luxury, little boxes, miniatures, some glass trinkets from Murano we call
margaritini
. No, do not fear I am trying to sell you something,' he added as she drew back. ‘For this I need a good English.'

‘It sounds good to me, very good already.'

‘You are kind. But now, what are you wanting to see?'

‘Well, the sights, the obvious ones I'm afraid. I saw illustrations of them in a book of Italy I borrowed when a child. Indeed I have described them.'

Why say this? Was it better to be responding to a stranger as a spinster hack or a married woman?

‘You are a writer, then? My name should make me one but I am not.' He smiled.

‘Well, sort of a writer, nothing great or very imaginative,' she said quickly. ‘Just, you know . . .' She trailed off.

‘Well, no, I do not, Signora,' he laughed again, ‘but maybe you will tell me as we look at all those things you have already so excellently described.'

‘My husband is . . .' She stopped.

He noticed the pause. ‘Perhaps I will meet your husband, he is a writer and not “sort of a writer” I think.'

‘What makes you say that?'

He grinned. ‘You have said about writing and not really writing, so I can conclude you are married to a great writer. The English are good at genius. We are not so – how shall I put it? – so very concerned with the attitude. We love skill, fineness. I myself deal in miniatures, small lovely things, not made by genius but much – what is the word? – craft. Though I have a relative, a sculptor, who might be what you wish.'

How unexpected he should discern so much, this stranger casually met.

While they were speaking she noticed again the taller man she'd assumed to be Signor Scrittori's friend still standing close by studying his paper at intervals, perhaps watching them as well. She couldn't be sure for he remained partially against the sun and his features were not fully revealed. Not enough to understand expressions. A stranger, she supposed, from the paler skin and something in his bearing and clothes. Dutch, German perhaps?

Did he disapprove of a foreign woman making such easy contact with an unknown man and one so clearly younger than herself? Maybe he was censorious. Or was he just glancing at her as a man might?

She smoothed her hair across her brow beneath her bonnet. Her clothes were drab but the blue silk scarf always brightened her face.

Perhaps he was English and heard her speech with Signor Scrittori.

When she looked again, he was gone. Probably he'd stood in his own thoughts, unaware of others. Men often did this.

The day was altering. Colour was seeping into the sky. In the puddles on the stones the water glinted. From a high building with gothic windows a woman was singing mechanically, cleverly, without passion. Technique only, no imagination, she caught herself thinking in Robert's words. What relief, how sensible! She raised her eyes and smiled at the young man.

‘You are a godsend – you say that? I read the word in your newspaper.'

They had become familiar as they walked along towards the Rialto after their visit to the basilica. ‘There is a young girl, my aunt, my distant aunt you would say, wants me to give her some lessons in the English. Her gracious mother has most particularly asked, but I have not the time and not the craft. Perhaps you might like to take my place and have from her some woman's hints of our city in return? You would be doing much service.'

A good idea to earn some money, yet she was dismayed that her need was so obvious.

They'd now crossed back over the Rialto bridge and were walking in the direction of the Jesuit church from where she planned to get a
traghetto
to Sant'Eufemia on La Giudecca. Near San Toma he stopped. ‘This is the palazzo where she is living,' he said. ‘What better time?'

He reached up and grabbed the bronze knocker and handle. He banged it against the door twice and the sound echoed in the distance. There must be a cavern behind the ornate wooden door.

After a lengthy pause footsteps could be heard, along with some other noise, like a cat or irascible gull. An old woman opened the door, seemingly with difficulty. She was followed at once by a pretty girl with startling and startled eyes – rich, dark and deep, set in milky cheeks. They contrasted with the blue and grey of the day. A full flash of a mouth smiled. It was a long time since Ann had looked on someone as young – and pure. So strange a word to come to her mind, though so often on Robert's lips. The girl, child really, opened her mouth to show pale even teeth. Her own, though a little yellowed, were good for her age, sensitive but not broken. These were white porcelain.