Stone Virgin (26 page)

Steadman broke into one of his rare smiles. ‘You’re the one in need of that advice,’ he said. ‘It’s funny, I used to think you a calculating fellow.’

They parted at the doorway, Steadman and Miss Greenaway making towards the Accademia boat stage. Raikes decided to walk a little before getting the
vaporetto
. It was just after ten – a time of evening he had always liked in Venice. Away from main thoroughfares the streets were quiet, the lamplight took on a selective, deceiving quality, hiding much that was decayed, touching with sudden caress a stretch of canal, the perfect ellipse of bridge and reflection, and broken glitters where a boat had passed. Aided by this light one could ignore the damp and desolation emanating from ground-floor windows and ruinous boat gates, abandoned as life retreated higher, see only the beauties of the Renaissance brickwork, the exquisite proportions of the house fronts. Time the despoiler had not much hurt the city’s beauty, but this was best seen now in ambiguous lights.

He walked in the general direction of San Marco, keeping north of the square. After some time, he found himself at the bridge behind the Basilica. A cruise boat, her decks hung with lights, passed slowly across his line of vision, emerging from the Giudecca Canal towards the open sea beyond. For a moment or two he saw her brilliant upper deck, towering behind the Bridge of Sighs; then she had slid noiselessly out of sight, cut off by the arcades of the Ducal Palace. Floodlighting lay in zones on the canal, flickering at the edges where the water lapped, like a message too rapid to be decoded.

He made his way down to the Riva degli Schiavoni with the intention of getting a boat back up the Grand Canal. However, in the window of the bar adjoining the Danieli Hotel he saw a thick arm in crumpled fawn suiting raised to beckon him, saw a large, pale, mouthing face – it was Slingsby. Too late now to pretend – he had already stopped and peered. Reluctantly he walked over and went in.

Slingsby was sitting alone at a table near the window, on a chair not designed for such spreading bulk. ‘I saw you passing,’ he said. ‘What’s your poison?’

This seemed a curiously old-fashioned form of words to Raikes, as if Slingsby had been reading boys’ adventure stories. He was reminded suddenly of Lattimer’s remark about hemlock. ‘I’ll have a cognac,’ he said.

‘I’m having gin,’ Slingsby said. ‘Hey,
scusi
, waiter.’ His face looked pinker, moister; the small blue eyes, though still containing alarm, had lost that affrighted glancing. ‘I like gin,’ he said. ‘It’s
clean
.’

A graceful, olive-skinned youth came unhurriedly towards them; he was dressed in a red silk shirt and close-fitting black velvet trousers which held his genitals in a tight, neat pack.

‘Ah.’ Slingsby brightened visibly at the sight. ‘There you are. For
mio amigo
one cognac. He is a noted restorer of stone virgins.’ The youth smiled broadly, uncomprehending. ‘For me,
doppio
gin.’ Slingsby raised his large hands and made delicate, curiously irrelevant-seeming gestures in the air before him. ‘A double,’ he said.

Smiling, the boy made a gap between thumb and forefinger. ‘
Così, Signore?
’

‘Dead right,’ Slingsby said. He watched the waiter’s tight-sheathed retreat. ‘My, that boy has white teeth,’ he said. ‘Real white. You married, Mr Raikes?’

‘No,’ Raikes said. With an instinct of caution, he added, ‘Still playing the field.’

Slingsby brooded a moment. Then he said, ‘This evening was interesting, it was instructive. All those people come to save Venice from the elements. Totally forlorn quest. Germans, Italians, Americans, British, French. Has it struck you, Mr Raikes, that the same peoples were at one another’s throats just a generation ago on this same terrain? Were you in the war, Mr Raikes?’

‘I was nine months old when the war started.’

There was no change in Slingsby’s expression of shrewd, haunted baby. ‘I guess not,’ he said. ‘You must have been too young. I was younger then myself. Young firm bodies we had in those days. You married, Mr Raikes?’

‘Playing the field.’

‘None of them believes in God either. They have all come to restore works of art made to the greater glory of God, and none of them believes in Him.’

The boy returned with the drinks and Slingsby went through a pantomime of the gesture with finger and thumb. ‘
Così
, eh?’ he said. ‘
Grazie, amigo
. Say, what’s your name? Antonio, Benito, Ricardo?’

‘Giuseppe.’ The boy pointed a finger at his chest. He smiled from one to the other of them.

Slingsby followed his sinuous retreat. ‘Great sense of humour, that boy,’ he said.

‘I don’t think it’s a forlorn quest,’ Raikes said, reverting to Slingsby’s earlier remark. ‘Every single thing saved is a victory – I mean of course in the limited terms in which we can see it. Even just one thing … It’s an expression of belief in the future. It is the most
pacific
thing anyone could do.’

There was a drift of rain against the window. From where he was sitting he could see the row of triple-headed street lamps, their dark-pink panes making a long looping pattern down the
riva
. Over to his left he made out the neon Campari sign on the Lido, glowing hideous in the distance. Another waiter, older than Giuseppe, was stacking the red and white canvas chairs round the tables outside the Danieli. He had just uttered, he realized, a statement of faith. ‘If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t be doing it,’ he said.

If Slingsby felt this as a reproach he gave no sign of it. ‘That Japanese guy had the answer,’ he said. ‘
It is the air
. Did you see him make that karate chop? In that chop the man’s true nature stood revealed. I did not like to feel I shared my human nature with that chopper, Mr Raikes. But that is not what depressed me.’

Raikes said nothing. In the case of a man so prone to depression and dismay as Slingsby, he thought, particular causes could not add much in the way of illumination. Outside on the pavement, in the thin rain, two grave elderly men with umbrellas had stopped in conversation. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly midnight, high time he was making for home. There was no one but themselves there now. They would want to close the bar. Suddenly, disagreeably, he remembered again that tomorrow he had his appointment at Vittorini’s clinic.

‘That chop was the perfect illustration,’ Slingsby said obsessively. ‘The air is killing Venice. The air is a reservoir for aggressive impurities. The air is killing us. What is it your poet says?’

‘I think you’re exaggerating quite a bit,’ Raikes said.

‘Exaggerating? Mr Raikes, I am forty-eight years old. I have spent my working life looking at deteriorated stone in all sorts of places. I have just been in Austria looking at the aggressive effect of sulphate-rich water on their water tunnels over there – they used alkalic Portland cement in the concrete, fatal of course. Before that I was in Edinburgh looking at the headstones in some of your graveyards over there. Before that I was engaged in studying the weathering rates of basalt on Bohemian medieval castles. I have probably seen more decaying stone than any other man alive. It has affected me, Mr Raikes, I won’t deny it. It has played havoc with my life. Because, you see …’

Slingsby paused, making solemn plucking motions in the air before him. ‘I have realized that the same thing is happening to us,’ he said. ‘With every breath we draw. Inside we are the same, foul and pitted and polluted. And now I find myself in Venice, which is the most horrifying place of all. It is a nightmare. The place is stuck all over with images in the human form, doges and dignitaries, angels, saints, madonnas – all riddled with bacteria. There couldn’t’, he said gloomily, ‘be a worse place for a man like me. I have asked repeatedly for a transfer.’

Giuseppe had emerged from behind the bar and was wiping tables and arranging chairs. Slingsby’s harassed eye lingered on his lithe bendings and stretchings.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘there are areas still relatively untouched. Recently quarried, so to speak. After about the age of seventeen the rot sets in. There are just a few precious years.’

Raikes got up. ‘I must be on my way,’ he said. ‘Are you coming?’

‘No, I’ll stay on a while.’

Raikes left him there in the deserted bar. Outside on the pavement, setting off for home, he gave a last look behind him. He saw Slingsby’s hand raised in that pantomime gesture, signalling for another
doppio
.

5

VITTORINI’S CLINIC WAS
on the Via Garibaldi. Light rain began to fall as Raikes was walking up towards it from the Arsenale stop.

He was apprehensive, talking to the girl in the small reception room and later to Vittorini; the latter, no doubt seeing this, took obvious care to reassure him, though without explaining much, compared at least to what an English doctor would have felt obliged to explain; it seemed that medical mysteries were more jealously guarded here.

It was not fear of discomfort or pain that troubled him but the feeling that he was somehow a
suspect
, a person under particular scrutiny. He had never had this feeling before, but he recognized it at once, in the affability with which he was treated, in the movements of the doctor’s manicured hands; he was an oddity, one whose behaviour might give rise to concern, who might need controlling. This unease persisted as he went through blood circulation tests and skull X-rays, not allayed by the spacious, well-appointed room or the deft and friendly sister; but it mounted to definite alarm only with the electro-encephalograph, which they gave him finally. Seated in the tall-backed chair, while the little steel cups were attached one by one to points of his skull, he felt truly in the grip of interrogators.

Some jelly-like substance was dabbed on his head before the electrodes were fixed in place. The sister perhaps sensed his tension for she smiled and said, ‘
Non si preoccupi, è solo una pomata
.’

Una pomata
? he thought. Only a salve? That couldn’t be true. It must be something to conduct the electricity better. They were treating him like a baby. Indignation contended with his alarm. Eight slender wires now led from the eight plugs on his head to a console against the wall. He sat there, skull jellied and studded, wired to the gently humming machine, while quite painlessly, without sensation on his part, the impulses of his brain were measured and recorded.

The apparatus was removed, the jelly sponged away – this last not by the sister but an ordinary nurse, summoned for the more menial task. She spoke to him cheerfully in the accents of the Veneto. He made an appointment for the forthcoming week, when the results would be made known to him. Within an hour of his arrival there, hair combed, umbrella remembered and retrieved, he was on his way back to the Arsenale.

It was not till much later in the day, with rain pricking the canal below his window, his diary on the table before him, that he thought in any conscious way about the business; and then it was with some return of that alarmed indignation. He remembered the lie about the
pomata
, the dab of the jelly, the wires trailing from his skull. He had been reduced to a mechanism,
plugged-in
. What could such a contraption possibly have to do with the swift and marvellous motions of his brain? Yet something irrevocable had happened there. Evidence had been extracted from him. Uneasily he took up his pen and drew the diary towards him; as usual he cast about for something of a factual nature to begin with; after some moments he found it:

Problems due to humidity still continue. There is a constant interaction of cold air from the Alps and warm air from the Adriatic and the two currents meet and contend over Venice. As I mentioned to Steadman, constant care is needed to prevent the glass particles from absorbing moisture and thereby clogging the machine. Time has been lost through the need to keep the beads dry. I have been wondering whether something less absorbent could be substituted for the glass. Aluminium oxide for example would not coagulate so easily. Must try this out when I return to England. The other main problem has been dealing with the dust. This is extremely dense and acrid and even with the full face mask I am using, which goes down well below the chin, some dust is inhaled. Apart from being disagreeable this is obviously dangerous to the health. Perhaps a larger mask could be used, though this would cause problems of air-supply. It should not be difficult to devise some sort of vacuum pipe that could suck up the dust while the work is going on. Presumably the nozzle of this could be attached to the abrasion instrument somehow. Some improvements will have to be made to the process. While the work remains so laborious and physically uncomfortable, recruiting local assistants will be difficult.

He paused. Perhaps a jet, fixed somehow to the nozzle, a cone of nebulized water playing round the point of impact … He thought of the Madonna, cleaned now to the waist. Another month, five weeks perhaps. There was regret in the thought of her completion, as well as eagerness. An intimate connection would be severed, and not with the Madonna only. He tried as he sat there to review his ‘attacks’, as Vittorini had called them, in the order in which they had come, but this was strangely difficult, he was impeded by memories of the accompanying sensations, the piercing light, the threat to balance, the intimate
knowledge
that attended the experiences. These, as objectively as possible, he had recorded in the diary already. But he had not so far attempted to interpret them. It was with the sense of taking a big step that he began writing again.

Could it be possible that I have really been seeing in this fragmentary and fleeting form true things about the past of the Madonna? That long straight shadow I saw lying across the room, on the first occasion, when I was just beginning … There were two people there, in a room of sunlight and shadow, it was hot, they were washing each other, naked, a man and a woman, lovers therefore, and the straight lines – were these cast by the stone,
before she was made
? The mystery is not in what I saw but what it means. And the face in the water, every feature was clear, she was smiling slightly, as if at some pleasing thought, a beautiful face, mouth full but well-shaped, level brows, delicate nostrils. There was a band of some kind round her neck.