Stone Virgin (22 page)

‘They pay me enough,’ Raikes said, rather stiffly.

‘Far below your deserts, I’m sure. You know, Simon, I took to you the moment I saw you. The fellow you came with, what’s his name, Wiseman, he’s a lightweight character, but I saw something in you from the first. This man is
serious
, I said to myself. I like that. More whisky? You’re not drinking much.’

‘Wiseman is one of the kindest men I know,’ Raikes said.

‘That may be.’ Lattimer’s tone was contemptuous. He paused a moment, as if to allow ripples to die away. Then he said, ‘As you know, I deal in sculpture. Sometimes there are questions of authentication. It would be very helpful for me if I could have the backing of a great institution like the Victoria and Albert – I mean in the person of one of its Conservation Officers. In the person of Simon Raikes. It would help to convince the client, you understand. Of course I could not ask you to do that without a very substantial fee.’

Raikes felt his face go hot. He had never been offered a bribe before. So this was why Lattimer had asked him. ‘I really don’t think –’ he began.

‘No need to make up your mind now. Think it over. I said a
substantial
fee, remember.’

Raikes was silent. He did not really know how he should react. His main feeling was one of embarrassment. He was casting about for some way of changing the subject, when Lattimer did it for him. ‘What do you think of my house?’ he asked suddenly.

‘It’s very nice.’

‘The reason I live in Canareggio,’ Lattimer said, ‘is because it’s off the beaten track. Not so many unique human beings in the form of tourists penetrate here.’

‘Quite a lot of people about at present,’ Raikes said.

Lattimer nodded. ‘They’re like flies,’ he said. ‘The temperature goes up a bit and they start to swarm.’

‘Some of those same flies might visit your gallery and settle on a Litsov bronze. Presumably you wouldn’t object to that?’

‘They would be clients,’ Lattimer said. ‘People with taste. Quite different. They’d better hurry up, though.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Litsov bronzes are a hot property.’

‘Has he always used her as his model?’ Raikes was aware that this was rather a shift, but he was afraid the conversation would veer away again. Lattimer was looking at him steadily, with an expression that seemed in some way ironical.

‘Always? They’ve only been married for about three years.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ve been handling Litsov’s work for six years now. Litsov is my creation. I have taken this talent of his, not so very considerable, and I have built it up. From nothing.’

‘You said he was a genius.’

‘I said he
had
genius. He has something that makes him different. That is quite a rare thing. I have built on that.’ Lattimer poured more whisky for himself and topped up Raikes’s glass. The bottle was more than half empty now. ‘Litsov is my creation,’ he said again. ‘For years I made nothing from him. For three years I even paid him a salary. Then last year I set them up here, in Venice. He isn’t really interested in money.’

‘But he must owe a great deal to her, to his wife,’ Raikes said, still valiantly persisting. He was determined to speak of her. ‘He obviously owes a lot to her,’ he said. ‘Somehow I thought they had been married longer.’

‘She gives that impression perhaps.’ Lattimer was smiling that narrow smile of his. ‘I have known Chiara quite a long time too,’ he said.

Raikes found himself disliking this smile. So Litsov had been a rising star when she had married him.
The winters are difficult
. Had she said that? Something of the sort – something to suggest more than one. There had been a certain kind of knowledge implied in Lattimer’s words which he did not want to analyse. He was suddenly unwilling to discuss Chiara Litsov with the man before him one single syllable further. In haste to get away from this subject, which he had been so eager to reach, he said, ‘Anyway I hope his work is not still piling up on the mainland.’

‘His work?’ Lattimer said sharply. ‘What are you talking about?’

The remark seemed to have taken him completely by surprise. The smile had gone from his face, leaving a drawn blankness of expression.

‘I thought there was some trouble with the man who does the casting. Litsov was speaking of it that day at lunch.’

‘Oh that,’ Lattimer said after a moment. ‘Yes, everything is back to normal now.’

Raikes had a sense that these words were improvised somehow, as if Lattimer had temporarily forgotten his lines. The whisky he had drunk was beginning to make him feel sleepy. It would be time to leave soon. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘speaking of surgeons, sometimes our work does resemble theirs, in a way.’

He began to tell Lattimer about experiments he had been involved in some years earlier to consolidate very friable Carrara marble by forming new calcium carbonate in the pores. This was an attempt to reproduce the natural process, observable at San Filippo in Emilia, where the spring water, emerging saturated with calcium bicarbonate and carbon dioxide, deposits calcium carbonate – stone in other words – on contact with the air. They had drilled holes in the marble, inserted glass tubes, fed in a solution of calcium hydroxide.

‘You are injecting the marble with a sort of plasma,’ Raikes said, ‘designed to harden in the veins and reinforce the substance. It didn’t work too well, I remember – too many unknown factors. The mechanism by which calcium carbonate is dissolved under some conditions and precipitated under others is not yet fully understood.’

‘I’ve been to San Filippo,’ Lattimer said. ‘Fascinating place. The spray seems to turn to stone as it comes out. You leave something in the water for a while and it gets a crust of stone on it. As a matter of fact I brought back a souvenir from there.’

He hesitated. An extraordinary smile came to his face, shy, secretive, painful-looking. He said, ‘Would you like to see it?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Raikes said, surprised. ‘Very much.’ He had not somehow associated Lattimer with souvenirs.

‘We’ll just replenish our glasses.’ Lattimer was still smiling. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’

Glass in hand Raikes followed his host into the recessed part of the room. There was a door leading into a passage, a flight of stairs, another door. They emerged into the night. A lamp above the door behind them cast a misty swathe over low bushes, the pale flowers of a wistaria, a gravel path, glinting faintly with mica. They were in what seemed a fairly sizeable garden – sizeable enough for Raikes, in this darkness at least, not to be aware of limiting walls. ‘You are lucky to have this,’ he said. The fragrance of the wistaria came to him mingled with some muskier scent, which he thought might be acacia flowers. What are we doing here? he wondered.

‘Another advantage of living in an unfashionable district,’ Lattimer said. ‘Luigi looks after all this. Hang on a minute.’ His voice held a quality of eagerness or anticipation.

He disappeared along the path leaving Raikes standing there at the dim verge of the lamplight, clutching his glass, aware of the silence of the house behind him, the darkness into which Lattimer had vanished, the enclosing strangeness of the garden. He made out, in the direction Lattimer had taken, the long low shape of a building, a shed of some kind. Light from this suddenly spilled out and he saw Lattimer again, standing in the light, at the open door.

‘Over here,’ Lattimer said.

Raikes advanced, paused at the door, looked inside. There were no windows in the place. A long strip overhead gave brilliant light. He stood blinking in the doorway, confused by the light and by the extraordinary clutter of objects here, displayed on stands, on the walls, in cases along the sides.

‘Come in,’ Lattimer said. ‘This is my museum.’

Raikes stepped inside, speechless still, not with surprise really, but a kind of wonder. His first hasty glance revealed a polished human skull on a stand, a large and beautiful piece of stone, veined with green, lying on a table near the door, a framed banknote on the wall. He could see no order or principle among these things.

Lattimer went some way into the room, picked something up from a table, returned. ‘This is what I brought back from San Filippo,’ he said.

It looked at first merely like an irregular lump of pinkish-grey granite, about the size of a hen’s egg. But a human likeness could be discerned in it, there was a face beneath, with features half obliterated by the growth of stone.

‘That’s a terracotta head underneath,’ Lattimer said. ‘Head of a woman. I left it in the water for an hour while I had a drink and that’s how it came out. I have not shown this place to anyone else, you know.’

This was obviously an attempt at a compliment. Lattimer’s mouth stretched in the same painful smile. ‘Everywhere I’ve been,’ he said, ‘I bring something back. These are only the Italian things.’

Raikes had an impression of long secrecy suddenly broken. Again he wondered if something had happened to disturb Lattimer. The man seemed drunk now: his eyes showed nothing, but his speech had thickened. He had started moving about among his possessions, the light shining on the smooth hair, the handsome, taut-skinned face, as he held up now one object, now another, for Raikes’s inspection. He explained everything. There was the viper he had killed in the foothills of the Alps, near Torre Pellice; there were framed photographs of himself in various guises; there was a fencing-sword with which he had won some tournament – it suddenly seemed appropriate to Raikes that fencing should be Lattimer’s sport. On a table at the far end was a litter of military items, a forage cap, webbing gaiters, a pistol in a holster, a bayonet.

‘Come and look at these,’ Lattimer said. ‘I was in the army here, you know. Sicily, Monte Cassino, Rome. Right through it. That is getting on for thirty years ago now. Monte Cassino, there’s a perfect example of what I was saying before. A mutual massacre going on and they spent weeks agonizing over whether to bomb an empty monastery.’

There was a gold wedding ring among the litter. ‘That belonged to a German once,’ Lattimer said. He held up the bayonet. ‘This could tell a tale,’ he said, ‘but I mustn’t boast.’

The attempt at modesty – in the midst of these evidences of vanity and self-obsession – was crass enough to be ludicrous almost, but Raikes felt no inclination to smile. ‘I must be going, I’m afraid,’ he said. Turning towards the door he caught sight of a shallow tray with a glass lid, containing tufts of fibrous-looking hair tied up with ribbon. He peered at these and Lattimer, seeing this, raised the lid.

‘Trophies of war, old boy,’ he said. ‘A different kind.’

Raikes looked down at the little bundles. He counted nine of them. There was not much range of colour – from black to dark brown, with one lighter coloured, reddish. The hair was very coarse, wiry-looking. It curled in all directions, not lying straight as a tress would have done. ‘It’s human hair, isn’t it?’ he said, doubtfully.

Lattimer chuckled. ‘Human it certainly is,’ he said. ‘That is pubic hair, my boy. Every time I win through, I ask the lady for a token. All these are Italian specimens. The names are on the ribbons, but I know them without that. I could tell you the exact place and circumstances for every one of them. This one was in Rome.’ He held up the little fibrous bundle with its faded red ribbon. ‘She was hot stuff,’ he said.

‘So that is what is meant by tuft-hunter,’ Raikes said. ‘I’ve often wondered.’ He felt slightly sick. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘It’s twenty past one and I have a day’s work to do tomorrow.’ Without waiting for Lattimer’s response he moved out into the garden and along the path towards the door.

Inside he refused offers of more whisky. Soon he was walking back through the deserted streets. The feeling of nausea lessened as he walked; but the cause remained, the thought that had pounced too swiftly to be anticipated or suppressed, the hideous possibility that one of those little bundles might be a sample taken from Chiara Litsov.

3

HE WORKED AT
the statue in the failing light, straining to make sure that no square millimetre of her person was missed. He was kneeling before her on his little mat, involved in the intricate folds of her robe, as these clung to or fell away from her thighs. In fact he was working between her thighs now, in the region of mythic speculation. Here at this point, beneath the draperies, lay the gateway to the miraculous. The Logos entered here, he thought, wielding the quartz-cutter with unremitting care and skill. As the brilliance of the sun fills and penetrates a glass window, in St Bernard’s simile. No damage to the membrane either on entrance or exit. It was a good image, apt both for conception and birth. Deriving of course from the beauty of medieval stained glass windows. Thus art replaces nature, he thought: the earlier symbols had been of rain or dew, penetrating and vivifying the earth. Before leaving England he had read everything he could find about the Annunciation.

He knelt back, switching off the instrument and removing his mask. The light was not good enough now. For reasons he could not fathom his request for an electric cable to be laid up here had not so far been attended to. Biagi had been politely vague on the matter. The architect in charge of work on the church floor said he thought it was a matter for the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti. They had referred him to the Soprintendenza alle Gallerie, who said they would put the matter in hand. So far, however, nothing had happened. It seemed a simple enough thing, a good light to work by.

This particular evening it didn’t matter; he would have had to stop soon in any case; it was the evening of the conference, when they were all due to congregate and report on progress under the auspices of Sir Hugo Templar. He would have to get back, change, collect his notes – he had agreed to say something about his work on the Madonna.

He knelt there for a while longer, looking at her. All was pure and splendid now from mid-thigh downwards, her restored parts beginning to take on a faint, glimmering incandescence in this failing light. Above this was the coarse mottling of her corrosion, the blackened concave parts merging already with the slowly darkening air. He glanced up at the averted face, the badger stripe of bleach that ran from forehead to chin. He had a sense, not for the first time, that she was about to break into some movement or gesture. This hour of the changing light was the time the angel came to her, or so it was generally believed – no doubt why the church had enjoined the faithful to say an Ave Maria at the time of the eventide Angelus bells. By a coincidence in itself miraculous she had been reading Isaiah
chapter seven
, verse fourteen at the time:
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son
…