Symposium (3 page)

‘Of
course not. How could I? Why should I? If he got it from you, on the other
hand, I suppose there would be a motive.‘ Her folded feet in the green shoes
with their long thin heels were poised on the coffee table.

‘I
haven’t given him anything, Ella,’ he said. ‘I wonder who gave him that watch?’
Ernst sounded worried. ‘Thousands of dollars, it represents wealth.’

‘You
were hoping I’d given it to him,’ said Ella.

‘I hope
nothing. I only wonder,’ said Ernst.

‘I was
hoping it was a present from you,’ said Ella. ‘If it wasn’t I feel strangely
afraid.’

‘It
wasn’t a present from me. I, too, feel a sort of fear. It isn’t so much the
watch, it’s the unknown factor,’ said Ernst.

‘If you
weren’t attracted to him there would be no need to be afraid,’ Ella said.

‘If we
weren’t both attracted,’ he said.

‘You,
perhaps, more than me,’ she said. ‘But all the same, I don’t want to be
involved with danger. Luke plus an unknown rich benefactor is danger. What do
we know about him, after all?’

‘Oh, we
know a good deal,’ said Ernst. ‘He’s awfully bright and he’s not afraid of
doing humble work to make his living. Quite remarkable in a boy his age. You
should ask him, Ella, where he got that watch.’

‘I
couldn’t dream of asking him.’

‘I mean
in a sort of maternal way. You could do it.’

‘Why
don’t you? In a sort of paternal way.’

‘I
don’t feel like a parent towards Luke.’

‘Well,
in any case, parents shouldn’t interfere, nobody should interfere with a grown
man. Luke should be free to come and go without our probing,’ she said.

They
decided to go out to dinner. Ella put on her street shoes and they walked to a
Greek restaurant.

‘I met
Hurley Reed today,’ said Ella. ‘He’s advising a television company on a film
that portrays an artist.’

‘They
never get it right,’ said Ernst. ‘It never looks right. Pushing their brush
into a palette and patting it delicately on to the canvas, all the while
reciting an important piece of dialogue, supposed to be a conversation, with
someone who has happened to drop in on them. In the studio. Do you think
painters keep open house in their studios?’

‘That’s
television and the world of films,’ Ella said. ‘One reads, sometimes, of
painters who used to be available while working.’

‘That
was in Henry James. Can’t the television make it more convincing? What are they
paying Hurley? He’s well-off. Doesn’t need the job.’

Ella
said, ‘You know, I don’t think money is the driving force, there.’

‘Nor do
I,’ said Ernst, for after all, he was a fair-minded man. ‘Not that I admire his
paintings. If there are messages in pictures I have got the message. I tell
you, Ella, that those flat backdrops like posters — deserted dodgems at the
seaside or a wooden impassive nurse standing beside a Red Cross van — remind me
of the bureaucratic life. Yet he sells for exaggerated prices.‘

‘Chris
Donovan hypes them up. Of course she believes in Hurley,’ said Ella, and she
thought, Ernst can’t help mixing up the price of a thing with the thing itself.

‘Nothing
sings, nothing flows. There are only inanimate signs. They blow neither hot nor
cold because they can’t blow at all,’ said Ernst. ‘And yet they fetch
thousands.’

It was
true that Ernst had good taste. He went to auctions and enjoyed the putting of
a money value on every work of art. He knew it was the wrong attitude, but he
couldn’t get out of the habit. He was a Catholic. When he visited the Pope,
even then, he couldn’t help calculating the Pope’s worldly riches
(life-proprietor of the Sistine Chapel, landlord of the Vatican and contents …).
Ernst knew it was a frightful habit, but he told himself it was realistic; and
it was too exciting altogether ever to give up, this mental calculation of what
beauty was worth on the current market.

By
unspoken consent Ella and Ernst were not sleeping together any more. If only
she knew whether he had slept with Luke. How promiscuous was Luke? The dread
disease. For that matter, if only he knew she had not slept with Luke there
would be a break in the tension. As it was you slept with everyone they had
slept with for the last ten years. There were contraceptives, but it would be
an innovation for Ernst. She thought, you can die of it ten years hence and I don’t
want to. Ernst thought the same. The trouble was they didn’t know Luke, and
perhaps Luke didn’t know himself.

Thinking
of Luke now, Ernst’s head swam. No sex, absolutely no sex. Romantic love has
changed, but absolutely so. Nobody in their senses can be carried away any
more, secure in the simple swallowed pill. Now people watch each other. Ella
suspects me. She suspects that I suspect her. We could both be right. It’s like
that vile practice of watching to see if your wife, your husband, goes to Holy
Communion. Now they watch for the contraceptive act.

Ernst
began to think of his work. Heads of states and their minions sitting at large
round tables with interpreters and bottles of mineral water, having such slow,
such slow, conversations. Elementary thoughts.

‘Chris
and Hurley are planning a dinner in a few weeks’ time. I hope you’ll be here?’
said Ella.

‘Yes,
I’ll be in London next week for a month.’

They
walked home. The Greek food they had eaten lay on their stomachs like stodgy.
They agreed: no more Greek food. Never again.

IT
was the first week of October, over two weeks before the dinner that
Chris Donovan and Hurley Reed were planning to give in London. Venice was still
warm, still crowded at the Rialto Bridge, St Mark’s Square and the other main
points of profuse attraction. Margaret Damien, so recently Margaret Murchie,
and her husband William were on the second week of their honeymoon, the first
of which they had spent in Florence. With only a few days left, they were
writing postcards as they sat in Florian’s overpriced café.

‘Venice
is a whore,’ said William.

‘You’re
not writing that down, are you?’ said Margaret. ‘It goes through the open post.
People can read.’

‘No,
but it’s what I think,’ he said cheerfully.

But
Margaret became solemn. ‘We should think positively,’ she said. ‘Venice is,
after all, unique.’

One of
the things he admired about his wife was her moralistic tendency, and
especially her refusal to speak ill of anybody. It was old-fashioned and
refreshing. Very unusual and people noticed it.

Margaret
came from St Andrews. She was tall, like William — if anything, slightly
taller.

‘Florence
is unique, but you had your bag snatched,’ he said, hoping to provoke another
piece of sermonizing. When she said nothing, he added, ‘Florence is also a
harlot, of course.’

‘Florence
was magnificent, it was sublime.’ She spoke as if Florence no longer existed
except in their memory.

Her
face, arms and legs were honey-tanned. William’s skin was darker. Margaret
would have been a Titian-haired beauty had it not been for her protruding
teeth. She had a melodious voice which made the sentiments she expressed all the
more mellifluous. William had good grey eyes and a pleasant mouth. He was
robust, not yet fat. She was twenty-three and he was twenty-nine; they had met
in London in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s, Oxford Street, less
than four months ago. She had spoken first:

‘Be
careful, those grapefruits look a little bruised.’

He was
enchanted right away, having just broken rowdily with a girl he had been living
with for almost two years — and she declared herself amazed, later that evening
at about ten past eleven, to find that he knew a couple who were related to a
girl she worked with in the office in Park Lane which was the publicity centre
for a petrol company. William had a job as a junior researcher in artificial
intelligence, the bionics branch. He explained this artificial intelligence:
the study of animal intelligence-systems as patterns for mechanical devices, a
mixed science involving electronics and biology. She was excited by this,
wanted to know more and more. She demonstrated such excited interest in the
idea that he thought at first she was putting it on. What attracted her was
that the capacity of, say, a cat to concentrate its eyesight intensely on one
relevant item, screening out the irrelevant, could be studied and copied by
human mechanic processes. The frog, the beetle and the bat — experts in their
fields … ‘And the snake?’ she said. ‘The snake, too,’ he told her. ‘We can
learn from the snake as a biological prototype for synthetic systems.’

Now
they were married and walking round Venice as if they had come out of the
picture postcards they had just written.

‘It’s
intoxicating,’ she said.

‘The
smell’s awful,’ said William.

But in
that way of hers that he admired so much, she said something about the smell so
as to make it of no account. Something about high tides and low tides, always,
over the centuries; William didn’t catch what it was she actually said; it was not
memorable, but her attitude was really, as always, on the side of light.

He took
her round the back alleys and lanes of Venice, away from the canals.

‘A
friend of mine paints these,’ he said. ‘He calls himself an anti-Canaletto. No
bridges and palaces. He’s an American artist called Hurley Reed. Everything he
does is very squared off and precise, like photographs. You can imagine what he
makes of these houses. Very wooden-looking but somewhat interesting, especially
painted under the usual Venetian sky which is the only patch of nature to be
seen. He’s anti lots of things.’

‘I’d
like to meet him,’ said Margaret.

‘Well,
of course, you shall. He’s a friend of mine. A good deal older, of course. In
his early fifties, something like that. He lives with Chris Donovan, another
friend of mine and my mother’s.’

‘Who’s
he?’

‘Chris
is a she. She’s an Australian widow, very rich. I love Chris, she’s a good
sort. Everyone loves Chris. You’ll meet her, too. They live in Islington. They
give wonderful parties.’

‘What
sort of age is she?’

‘Ageless.
Maybe forty, maybe fifty. Of course she has the money to preserve her looks.’

‘It’s
the expression that counts,’ said Margaret. ‘It’s the expression that reveals
the inner person.’

William
experienced a slightly heretical or treacherous cloud of a thought: Can I keep
up with all this goodness and honeymoon sweetness of hers? So pale honey-yellow
and pale moon-grey in tone. I’m bound to put my muddy boots on the vast soft
carpet of her character. One of these days, I’ll err …

He took
her on a
vaporetto
to see some Tintorettos, to see Giorgione, to marvel
at the mosaics. She was so carried away by the famous
Assumption
in the
Frari that it was on the tip of William’s tongue to beg her not to levitate.

But it
seemed to him it was only in art that their minds really differed. Her moral
charm, to him, exacted a small price: she liked art to have an exalted message
whereas if there was anything he hated in art, as in life, it was a sermon. She
bought a Venetian doll for herself and a toy gondolier for him. It made him
feel cosy.

When
they were home from their honeymoon, one of the first letters they opened was
an invitation from Chris Donovan and Hurley Reed, to dinner on the 18th of
October.

William
rang to accept and asked Hurley Reed to come in for a drink soon, and meet
Margaret. Which Hurley did, the next evening.

Margaret
had filled the sitting-room with autumn leaves from the florist. She was
wearing a longish green velvet dress with flapping sleeves. Hurley was
wondering what she had to pose about in that pre-Raphaelite way. To his
astonishment William was apparently besotted with his bride.

She was
the sort of girl who made Hurley very homesick for America and a touch of good
sense in a woman. What is wrong with her, he wondered, looking at Margaret,
that she has to drape herself in green velvet against a background of fall
foliage? She could look wonderful in a plain civilian outfit. Why doesn’t she
get her teeth fixed?