Stone Virgin (41 page)

He turned his back on the water and began to walk away in the direction of San Alvise. Almost at once, however, by a sort of homing instinct, he turned off towards his church, the place of his labours. He did not want to see anyone, talk to anyone. By disposition he was solitary – under stress he would always turn inward. Now he was glad of the approaching darkness, the relative quiet of the streets in this northern area of the city.

The
campo
was almost deserted. There was light around the café and a few people were sitting within the enclosure made by the trellis and the potted shrubs. To Raikes’s intense dismay, as he was passing through this zone of light he heard his name called and next moment found himself confronted by Barfield, who was wearing a striped tie and a smart navy-blue blazer with glinting brass buttons.

‘We’re sitting over there,’ Barfield said with unwarranted familiarity, as if they had arranged to meet and it was sufficient now to indicate the place.

‘I was intending –’ Raikes felt suddenly bereft of all will and energy. Glancing in the direction indicated he saw sharp-featured Muriel in a red dress and clashing amber necklace, head tilted in the act of draining a glass. ‘I don’t think –’ he began.

‘We’re celebrating, old man,’ Barfield said. ‘Join us for a quick one?’

Helplessly Raikes allowed himself to be escorted to the table. He greeted Muriel with a bow and sat down. ‘Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,’ he said. ‘That’s Milton.’

‘This is Barolo, very good stuff,’ Barfield said. ‘I’ll get another glass.’

‘What are you celebrating?’ From where he was sitting he could see across the square to the dim façade of the church, make out the box-like structure half-way up, within which his Madonna awaited the last stage of metamorphosis. Tonight, he thought, I must finish her tonight. Then tomorrow … It would be easier to face things if he had finished.

‘We’ve got the first of the paintings back on the wall.’ Muriel was wearing lipstick tonight and had granted her mouth too generous a shape with it. ‘
The Woman Taken in Adultery
,’ she said.

‘Consolidated, cleaned, restored, forgiven.’ Barfield said. ‘Sorry, I was thinking of the hymn.
Reframed
. Good as new. It’s the first to be completed, you know, so we thought we might make it a social occasion. All work and no play makes Jack a dull sod.’ His manner was more relaxed than usual, a fact which Raikes attributed to the workings of the Barolo.

‘We asked Owen,’ Muriel said, in her cross-patch fashion – no change in her, at least. ‘He hasn’t turned up yet and we’ve been here nearly an hour. And Pauline, of course …’

‘Perhaps they have other fish to fry,’ Raikes said. His voice sounded curiously pure and detached to him as if his words were distilling on the air rather than straggling from his larynx. He was in some neutral zone where warring elements meet and sheer off; Muriel’s celebratory perfume, Barfield’s gleaming buttons and his stripes of some obscure club or association, the house in the Lagoon with water slipping at the landing stage, Litsov’s meek mouth.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘congratulations anyway.’

‘We could never have done it,’ Muriel said, ‘could we, Jerry, if we hadn’t spent so many nights working late?’

‘And you handicapped,’ Raikes said vaguely. ‘Broken limbs, dislocations and so on.’ It was to their groans in the darkness that his quest had begun.
Oh Jerry, Jerry, Jerry
. All the saints and virgins staring down. ‘You battled on,’ he said.

It was the right note. From the way Barfield was pouring out his Barolo, from the irritable but pleased stretching of Muriel’s reddened mouth, he could see that this remnant of the Tintoretto people were once more fully in their heroic role. This was Homeric stuff, the sweet carousing after hardships suffered and dangers survived.

‘Well, of course,’ Barfield said, ‘we’ve had our ups and downs, haven’t we, Muriel? But that’s what life is about, isn’t it? And you’ve got to be humble. We can’t know everything, can we? I mean, we don’t even know one another. Wasn’t it you who talked about people trying to learn about death by measuring corpses? That was early on, when we were just beginning here. I won’t tell you a lie, I was put out at the time. But you were right. Facts don’t get us all that far. And even when it comes to facts we never get the essential ones.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, take Tintoretto. We can analyse his paint surface until we know every colour he used, not only that but how he made them, the constituent elements. For example, we know that he made his gesso by roasting gypsum, grinding it to powder and binding it with animal glue. We know to the month when he gave up the gesso preparation and started painting on a dark ground. We know how he made the dark ground. We can look at a window frame and we can say this was done with white lead and a coarse brush. We can say that is arsenic sulphide, we can dissolve this in chloroform and prove it to be indigo. Every stage, from the first brushstroke … But we don’t possess, and we never will possess, the one essential piece of information.’

‘What is that?’

‘What did he use?’ Barfield widened his eyes in the visionary way Raikes now remembered. ‘What did he use to give his colours that quality of vibrancy? How is it that they do not fade? He used something else, some additive, some drying agent, completely undetectable by modern science.’

‘If it is undetectable, how do you know that it is there at all?’

‘It must be there. How else can you account for the special quality of radiance in late-fifteenth-century Venetian painting? Titian has it too. People have always recognized it. The Venetian Secret they call it. They knew something we don’t.’

‘You may be right,’ Raikes said, ‘but it seems odd to me to pin your faith on a material explanation, and one that is completely undemonstrable. It rather contradicts what you began by saying.’ He rose to his feet with a sense of effort. ‘I’ll have to be getting along,’ he said. ‘Are you working late tonight?’

Muriel giggled, a rather startling sound. She said, ‘We’re not dressed for it.’

‘We’re going to have dinner when Owen comes,’ Barfield said.

In haste to forestall an invitation, Raikes began at once to move away. ‘Well, have a nice time,’ he said. He crossed the lighted area adjoining the café, gaining with a sense of release the shadows beyond. He crossed the square on the far side, made his way round the curved projection of the apse and began immediately to climb up his ladder.

For reasons still not clear to him he had never succeeded in obtaining a light from official sources; the matter had been passed from one authority to another without any result. Finally accepting defeat Raikes had provided himself with two strong, battery-operated lanterns which he could hang at different levels from the scaffolding. These he lit now and hung up, on either side of the Madonna’s head.

His equipment was as he had left it, under the tarpaulin sheet. Half mechanically he donned overalls, cap and mask. Within a minute or two he was at work on the last remaining area of pollution, delicately despite his tiredness clearing the blackened, clotted gypsum from the sockets of the eyes, stroking away with the hail of particles the badger stripe of bleach that ran from the forehead to the bridge of the nose. The cutter hissed in fading or intensifying volume, combining with the hum of the compressed nitrogen fuelling the motor to make a varying pulse of power. Raikes shut his mind to all thought. The world was reduced to this small, dusty enclosure, the Madonna’s face, the steady white light of the lamps.

When he stopped finally it was almost midnight and her face was without blemish, her sight restored. He knew now whose face it was – it was as if he had known all along, had unconsciously resisted the knowledge. That faintly smiling, dreaming face, the curve of the mouth, the eyes narrow and long, the wide, rather low forehead, he had seen them before: it was the face of the drowned girl, unwilling and yet complaisant, expressing a sort of secret complicity in her own death; it was the face which had looked at him through clear water, the same he had seen blurred and indistinct through some thicker, less transparent medium. Of course, he thought, she must have been the model, Girolamo used her for his model. Was she the naked, laughing girl in the room with the straight shadows? That band round her neck … She had died by violence, he knew it suddenly, and yet the face had been peaceful, slightly smiling, like the one before him now. The drowned do not smile. He thought of Litsov’s solemn stare, the meekly open mouth accepting death like a sacramental biscuit.

He had stepped back to the rail, surprise at this recognition flooding his mind. Afterwards, when he tried to think about the next few moments, it seemed to him that he had ceased quite to look at the Madonna, or had relaxed his attention in some way, without however turning it on anything else. It was in this unguarded moment that Raikes felt the hush and resonance, the sense of exposure and isolation, the half-sweet, half-fearful sensation of swooning, and he was looking again at the statue, the scale was the same, there was the same distance between them, but the air had darkened, there was a sense of space, the source of illumination was not now the lamps but the Madonna herself, as she glowed in this darkness with a radiance of her own, a soft, enveloping flame of light, strangely local and contained, not reaching into the darkness all around. This time the sense of swooning was more intense, Raikes’s balance was lost, and he sank to his knees on the platform.

How long this lasted he had no means of telling. He was still kneeling when he came to himself again, with that belated alarm, the Madonna above him, the bright lamps on either side with moths fluttering round them, her face turned slightly to greet the angel’s news.

He walked back to his apartment in a state of suspended consciousness almost, noticing nothing of his surroundings. In the dim light of the hall he saw that the brown carrier bag was no longer where Signora Sapori had placed it in readiness. Luigi must have been then.

On the hall table there was a letter for him. He took it upstairs with him and read it in his room. It was from Wiseman, apologizing for not answering his queries earlier, explaining that he had been away for several days attending a conference in Milan. Unfortunately, there was not much to tell in any case. He had found both names in Capellari’s
Origin of Illustrious Gentlemen
. The Rovereto were an old but not particularly distinguished Venetian family ennobled only after the Serrata of 1296. Matteo was a second son. In 1415 he had married one Maria Bernardoni, who bore three sons and outlived him by ten years. The Bernardoni were Piedmontese, with large estates up towards the French border, very powerful in local terms but too remote to have much influence further south …

Piedmont, he thought at once. That must be the connection, but through the wife. In that case it was the artist, not the girl …

He was exhausted. Standing there in the chilly silence of his room, still shaken by that terrible radiance of the Madonna, wrestling with the implications of Wiseman’s letter, worried by Luigi’s sinister promptness, he felt a sudden overmastering need to deaden his nerves, achieve some peace. Without thought, without debate, he went to his drawer and took out the plastic cylinder which contained his phenobarbitone. He filled a glass with water from the handbasin, and took thirty milligrams, the dose Vittorini had prescribed.

9

WITHIN HALF AN
hour oblivion descended on Raikes and he slept without stirring. He rose at his usual hour, aware of a slight heaviness in his limbs but clear-headed, with all the details of what he intended to do that day firmly present to his mind.

As soon as he was dressed he got out his diary. This would be one of the last entries. With none of his usual hesitation he put in the date at the top of the page, June 16th, and began.

The Madonna is now completely restored, her whole surface free of corrosion. The first and main consequence of this is that she will have to be sealed with the least possible delay. Naked as she is, she is extremely vulnerable to further pollution. The air of Venice is a killing agent, as Slingsby remarked to me once, and it works with terrifying speed on exposed stone. If she were left for long now, longer than a day or so, even in this drier weather, it would be like curing someone of a fever then stripping off his clothes and turning him out of doors. I am planning to do the sealing later on today, using wax acrylic and a propane burner. That done, my work in Venice will be over.

It is clear to me now, in the light of Wiseman’s information, that this Matteo di Rovereto was Girolamo’s patron, and that the letter from Federico Fornarini which Chiara got for me is – must be – a reply to some previous letter from di Rovereto asking for clemency on Girolamo’s behalf, not on the girl’s, as I first thought. The wording is ambiguous but the real clue is in the Piedmontese connection. Di Rovereto’s wife was a Bernardoni. Natural she should take an interest in him – perhaps it was through her influence that he obtained the commission in the first place. Odd to see a Fornarini cropping up in this earlier period, right at the beginning of the Madonna’s career. But they were numerous enough, I suppose.

If I am right and it is Girolamo that is being pleaded for, the girl’s character acts in mitigation for
him
, not for herself, so she must be a bad character, and a public bad character in those days must mean a prostitute surely. All this seems reasonable enough. He must have been accused of some crime in connection with the girl. Was she the victim? Disregard for human life, the letter said. Murder then, or serious assault. She was the victim, yes. Is she the drowned girl? In that case the model for the Madonna, the drowned girl, this hypothetical whore, are all the same woman. Yes.

But in that case … She was smiling, though she had died violently. I’m convinced that everything I have seen in these famous attacks of mine has contained some truth, some relevance to the Madonna, even the things I do not understand and perhaps never will. So it must mean something, this smile. Did I make some mistake, get the message wrong? Perhaps I simply transferred the smile from the living face to the dead one – the kind of thing that happens sometimes in dreams. Or could there be a different order of truth in it, something emblematic? Was she smiling because she had been vindicated in some way? Or avenged? And the light that shone from her, from the Madonna. That was the miracle of course, that is what they saw, or had a strong impression of seeing, three hundred years later, in the garden of what is now the Casa Fioret. The light came from her. There is some sort of sexual treachery here too. Hush money to the Bishop. This ‘Cornadoro’, whoever he was, the cuckold, he laid golden eggs – like poor Litsov.