Viper Wine (50 page)

Van Dyck had offered him a copy, but he did not wish for a copy, only for his friend’s own work. The portrait was mightily well done, capturing such grace in his Venetia, and some sort of courage in himself, he supposed. It was a world away from the flat, stiff likenesses of his forebears, who always seemed propped against the dark. Instead, this was utterly of the moment. Their health was unsurpassed; they seemed to breathe, to sit comfortably in their chairs. Venetia’s expression had a wisdom, a glowing forbearance, to which people were much attracted.

And yet in truth she was more tense than ever since he was come home. She turned her head away from him, like a sick heliotrope. Was the taste of her lips different? Was her climacteric come early? What was the unusual heat in her kiss, and the coldness in her limbs? He wished he had the portrait, to help him to see her better.

Every gent and lady who aspired to immortality, or fashion, or merely the epithet ‘fine’, passed through the Blackfriars studio, and all of them saw the Digbys’ portrait. They came up the water-stairs and into the grand salon, where the painting commanded the light from the river. Many of the studio visitors exclaimed to see the Digbys, greeting their portrait, and babbling as they took it in.

‘But so it is, when you are born a true beauty,’ sighed Mistress Daubigny.

‘Age cannot wither her,’ said Belinda Finch, peevishly.

‘D’you think I should wear more blue?’

‘Venetia Stanley, is it?’ said the husband of the first. ‘She’s one they say is altogether’ – he whistled and drew curves in the air – ‘
bona roba.
’

Both ladies nudged him with embarrassment, as if the painting could hear.

‘Oh gee!’ said Andy Warhol. ‘She looks so unhappy. It really suits her. It gives her an expensive aura. I bet she folds her money lengthways. I met a Rothschild who kept her money folded in a little Scotch purse with a pom-pom . . .’

Sir Kenelm frowned at this silver-haired changeling and asked him what his business was. ‘Just teaching Van Dyck some tricks. I told him never to include a pimple in a painting, because a pimple is a temporary distraction. I shan’t stay long, though – I’m too insecure to talk to strangers.’

The editor of
Vogue
passed through, too, gazing at Venetia briefly, nodding dispassionate approval. This was perfect. Venetia would sell; she was a cover. Anything could have happened to her in life, too much Botox, or too much drink, or a botched lip job – none of it showed once her image was up here, tweaked and manipulated. Van Dyck could always be counted upon. Any second-rate artist could create a generic beauty. The point was to make the beauty particular – ideally, recognisable.

When Edward Sackville saw the painting of Venetia, he genuflected, or so it was reported. It became common for gentlemen Kenelm scarcely knew to say, ‘Oh sir, your wife is looking so well’, or, ‘Your beautiful Lady, what a fine pairing you make’, which gave Kenelm an instant’s confusion, before he realised these strangers had seen their portrait, and thus the familiarity they felt for him and his wife was an illusion, maintained by a trick of oil and brushwork, as one illusion begets another.

And like an abysm of mirrors, the illusions carried on, so that it was declared at court that Venetia had never looked more gracious, never commanded such noble charm. The cleverness of the portrait was that Van Dyck had not overstated his case, but given her an aura of tired elegance, a mildly enervated wanness, and – most clever of all – she looked very like the Queen. Even though the Queen was ten years younger.

Venetia’s likeness went out into the world, on billboards, on a big screen, displayed, retouched, elongated, a fantasy, a capriccio of perfection, and it barely mattered what her own self had become. The images were so much more powerful than she.

Which sculptor could make a King’s likeness without ever looking on him? Better to ask which working sculptor could not do such a thing. Images are made of reputation; likeness follows scurrying after. Bernini kept a Van Dyck study of Charles I in his studio, then sent a marble bust in its image over from Rome. It was widely agreed that the bust captured perfectly the King’s divine soul and earthly physiognomy. The court viewed the bust as more wondrous because of its tele-production. It was said that as the King turned to Catholicism, the hairline cracks in the marble forked and spread.

In churches all over England, paintings were coming into bloom. Under Archbishop Laud, icons and statues and carvings were permitted again, brought out from their safe-houses, unwrapped and dusted down. Steeple-crosses, bench-ends, misericords: all the symbolic prettinesses of a church appeared, and the Puritans shut their eyes to these distractions, these superstitions; and when they could not shut their eyes they shook their heads, inwardly revolted, their silence building up, with mounting pressure, against the wrongful tyranny of the screen, the stage, the lie of painting.

Kenelm did not mind that his own hairline, according to their portrait, appeared to have receded a little, shewing a glint of shiny scalp. He believed, with Dr Fludd, that baldness was a sign of astuteness, and a subtle mind. Van Dyck knew this, or else he would have given him more hair. He was not only a great artist; he also knew how to please.

It was pleasant for Kenelm to hear, several times a day, how beautiful his wife was looking. He could not help but believe it, by repetition. And yet a part of him knew that since he came back from Naples she was somehow changed, scarred and distorted, and he wondered if his eyesight had declined of late, and when he was at work reading a small script or reedy cipher in his private library he used spectacles – but he would never have worn these to read his wife’s face. That would have been cruel. He was more careful of her than that.

It saddened him to feel her detail slipping from him, as a fern, which he loved to regard in its furled intricacy, might become a curved prow of green; the Natural Philosopher in him longed to perceive her through a magnifying glass. But the Alchemical Philosopher in him knew that now his sight of her was softened, he was closer to perceiving her as she was in his heart. If the Stone were in a different guise or obscured with clouds of Sulphurick vapour, he was yet nearer to the truth of the Stone, by understanding its qualities rather than its appearance. One does not see only with the eyes.

He never liked to riddle thus about Venetia; his tendency towards her had always been instinctive, sure and true, not thought, or scrupled, like a scholar’s disputation. But now he felt as if he could not quite reach her. And so he decided not to put his mind to it, but to go and kiss her. He trod the stairs with vigour, a husband on the tarmac, in the taxi, on the doorstep.

Perhaps after they had been good lovers to one another he would give her the Naples pearls, which he had bought for her in a fit of homesickness, but now doubted, and had not given to her yet out of some little embarrassment. What if she asked how much they cost?

He found her door was locked, and he had to pause outside while she moved around the room, begging his patience in a high, guilty voice. What was she performing? One of those arcane female procedures, about which he did not wish to ask. He waited, counting the lines on the palm of his left hand.

On the other side of the door she took a final, decisive gulp, and hid and locked the empty vial in her closet. Well, what of it? She could do what she liked. She was now Good. She visited Bartholomew’s, and gave her money to the poor, and she did not drink the Viper Wine any more, so what harm could it do to sup one last time? She had forgotten what it tasted like. She was Saved.

Then the messenger boy had come before her with a May Day basket. She had received several of these already, from friends and neighbours, but this one looked different. It was set with snakeweed and little scarlet pimpernels, and shaped so she dared to hope it might contain a vial, and as she unfolded the wrapper she saw her heart’s wish, red and shameless, cloudy like a sandstorm, and just as heavy as a vial of Viper Wine should be. Across the inside wrapper in his sinuous writing, Choice expressed a few carefully chosen words of obsequious address, and wished her a ‘fair and beauty-filled’ first of May.

She nearly sent it back directly, but all the messengers of her house were busy, and she hid it in her closet instead. There it throbbed and tick-tocked the whole day through, pulsing like a living heart. She tried to close her ears to its noise, but even when she was upstairs, with the boys, or looking at the new editions of
A Mirrour for a Modest Wife
, or talking with the cook about their May Day dinner, she heard it. At some point in the afternoon it became clear to her that there was one easy, elegant solution to the Wine’s disquieting presence in her closet.

The taste of it was stronger than she remembered: bitter as witch’s spittle. She swallowed the first half and lay on her back, laughing, dizzy. She began to cough, throatily. Choking, she tried to sit up, but carefully: at all costs she must not spill the second half of the draught. She was gazing into the vial’s red whirlpool, trying to decide whether she should drink the rest now or tomorrow, when she heard Kenelm’s knock at her door.

When she let him in, the Wine and his hot blond kisses acted together, like a love-charm. She was giddy with longing. As Kenelm touched her and she closed her lids, she saw before her eyes pink worms dissolving into burnished gold, turning into the forked tails of the ribbons on the Maypole on the Strand, flying into the red-dark depths of the stained glass in Oxford. But she had not been to Oxford these ten years. She giggled aloud, and Kenelm thought it was because he was tickling her, and he tried to tickle her more. She gasped, because she felt his fingertips brush her scarring. She turned her face away.

They were usually gentle lovers to one another, unlike Olive and Endymion and their chilli-pepper pleasures. Yet this time she felt a will to bite, to pinch, to punish him for being so kind to her, so blind. She did not like the foolish happiness in his smile. She showed him her back, inviting him to mount her like a jade in a stable, arching her back, putting her tail in the air, knowing he would be thinking of the Skyrian horses in the
Aeneid
, waiting for Zephyros, the West Wind, to fill them with foals that would run fast as the wind. He was so quick she had only a brief, blood-pumping pleasure in it, and as they embraced afterwards she put her back to him again, flinching and removing his hand when he tried to stroke her cheek.

Yearning to be understood, she asked him if he ever wished for his youth again.

‘Oh, plenty times, my darling. To put all one’s strength and urgency into games of mud, and hunts for birds’ nests. To shoot the cannon of dried peas. To be admiral of a toy boat. To see the world in a hazelnut shell, a squirrel’s goblet . . .’

She let the wind whistle through the gulf in their understanding of one another, as he talked of Gayhurst and childhood, and for the hundredth time he said she broke his toy horse when they played together as toddlers, and she replied she did no such thing. She put on her nightcap to preserve her curls and before they fell asleep, she asked him for a story: how when he was a lad of eleven he was taken by cart across the county to meet Shakespeare, and Shakespeare bid him – what was it? But Kenelm was already twitching with the first jerks of sleep and he said he would tell her the whole story in the morning, with the boys.

The cries of the second watch of the night woke Kenelm, and he left Venetia where she was sleeping and trod gently to the window. He had been dreaming, as to his shame he sometimes did, of other women, dildo-toting drabs with unlaced gaiters, and he exhaled with happiness and relief to wake and find her sleeping next to him. From lust and madness she was his salvation, his best beloved. He wished she would take less of the bedclothes. She could be selfish in this respect. He groped for the cold ceramic pot and urinated into it – or nearby, it was all one – staring beyond the half-drawn curtain into the midnight empyrean, the soundless indigo. A dog barked, but no friendly dawn showed yet, and all of London seemed abed, only a strange visitation streaked across the darkness: a most curious cloud.

Kenelm moved towards the window.

The cloud, like a pale apparition, stretched out across the sky in a shining, shifting drift, which glowed yellow-pink. As Kenelm looked closer, he saw the cloud had a nacreous quality, pearlescent and particoloured, like the inside of an oyster shell.

It seemed to glow of its own sweetness. Kenelm could see no braziers or beacons flaming in the city beneath – the cloud, he judged, was not the reflection of light but the source of it.

‘A noctilucent cloud,’ said Kenelm, trying the words out.

It reminded him of the Philosopher’s Stone, when, cradled in its aludel, it developed its rainbow sheen, after the third crisis of the Great Work had passed, and the hermetic corpse began its exquisite putrefaction.

He pulled the window-drapes apart and hastened to wake Venetia. The bed and its white hangings were changed by the coloured light, dimming from saffron to sulphur, and thence to palest green. Green was the colour of the lion in alchemy, corrosive and devouring.

‘Look,’ he said, excited as a child to show her his discovery, ‘a shining night-cloud . . .’

But she was sound asleep, and would not stir, though the cloud was softly breaking into new colours. Was this sorcery or merely radiation? Was it light pollution from an undiscovered country? Or the gorgeous smoke-puff of a future disaster, drifting silently through his mind like a ghost ship through the sea?

Was this the long-awaited Satellite of Love?

‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he sang gently.

He sought to rouse Venetia but she would not let go of the coverlet.

‘Come, come,’ he coaxed her, trying to pull it out of her hands, though they would not give. ‘Of what does this cloud foretell, darling? What does it signify? Every portent has its meaning.’

Venetia lay pale and inert.

He knew the cloud was warning him of something, but he did not know what, and his ever-postulating mind went straight to the political, foretelling the revolt of Parliament, or the failure of the Exchequer, or a sickness in the body politic. Perhaps they would be drawn into the war on the Continent. Or perhaps the Godly ones would have no more of Papistry, and rise to drive them out. Tomorrow was the first of May; perhaps the cloud was a May Day token, come to wake him to bring in the spring.