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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
'Excellent . . . at once romantic and tough, absurd yet realistic, escapist yet down-to-earth.' -- Jenny Uglow Grace Kilmichael, the well-known painter, is running away. She's escaping her husband, and his wandering eye, her bullying grown-up children, and the tiresomeness of being herself. En route to Split and Dubrovnik, Grace travels through Paris and Venice, and to the glories of Torcello. Here she meets Nicholas – fascinating, rebellious, completely unsuitable (and half her age). Thrown into turmoil by their relationship, it is not until Grace arrives in the remote, unspoilt beauty of the Illyrian coast, among the wildflowers and peaceful villages, that she can truly begin to find enlightenment. Both farcically funny and full of wisdom, this is a classic novel of escape and rediscovery, set against the glorious Illyrian spring. 'This is the most intelligently escapist novel – and scandalous for its time. What astonishes is its freshness. Reading it is like taking a holiday – although it is a serious sentimental education too.' -- Kate Kellaway 'It still makes the perfect holiday read.' -- Lady Magazine 'Few people can evoke the spirit of a place more vividly than Ann Bridge.' -- Linda Kelly
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‘This is the most intelligently escapist novel – and scandalous for its time. What astonishes is its freshness. Reading it is like taking a holiday – although it is a serious sentimental education too.’ Kate Kellaway
‘Few people can evoke the spirit of a place more vividly than Ann Bridge.’ Linda Kelly
‘The glorious landscape of pre-tourist Croatia is the backdrop for Bridge’s charming 1935 novel about marriage, motherhood and self-discovery.’ Daily Mail
Illyrian Spring
ANN BRIDGE
To all the Linnets
To one Nicholas
and to Frances and Patrick
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
About the Author
ALSO BY ANN BRIDGE
Copyright
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The spelling of the name Komolac has presented something of a problem. On the spot it is called ‘Komolatch’; this pronunciation would properly demand an accent on the final c. The best Yugo-Slav authorities, however, leave the c unaccented, and I have followed their usage.
A.B.
Place names in Illyrian Spring
ONE
Lady Kilmichael took her seat in the boat train at Victoria hurriedly, opened The Times, and hid behind it. When another passenger got into the carriage, she peeped out furtively to see who it was – but it was only an archidiaconal-looking clergyman, a total stranger, and she relapsed behind The Times again, with a sense of guilt. Women in the early forties who have been wives and mothers for over twenty years are liable to suffer from a slight sense of guilt whenever they embark on any purely self-regarding activity; but Lady Kilmichael had better reasons than this for her desire to avoid the eyes of acquaintances on her journey. She was leaving her home, her husband and her family – possibly for good. In a way it is rather a mistake, in such circumstances, to travel by the Simplon Orient Express; but Lady Kilmichael was going to Venice, and she lived in a world which knew no other way of getting to Venice than to travel by the Simplon Orient Express. The King’s Messenger, she had observed with relief, was one of the ones she didn’t know.
When the train pulled out and began to lurch through the south-eastern suburbs of London, she put her paper down with a slightly increased sense of safety, and sat staring out over the chimney-pots of the poor. It was right to have come away, she told herself; there was really nothing else to do, in the circumstances. And no one really needed her any more. The boys were both at Cambridge; Nigel had his fellowship practically secure; and when Teddy had finished with college, Walter had only to lift his little finger to get him into a job. The best of being an economist, and a rich one, was that you had the commercial kings in your pocket. As for Linnet – Gina was going to chaperon Linnet this season – for what that was worth! Linnet would get on as well, or really better, without her mother. A delicate contraction emphasised Lady Kilmichael’s fine clear brows at the thought of her daughter. Why, oh why, had she and Linnet got so hopelessly across one another? She loved the child, she admired and even respected her; up till a year ago she had thought Linnet very nearly perfect. And Linnet, most comfortingly, had seemed to think the same about her mother; absurdly, touchingly, undeservedly fond of her, the child had been. But for the last year, hopeless! She had tried so hard not to ask, not to grasp, not to criticise; she hardly ever did anything but praise and agree. But even that was wrong; whatever she said or did was wrong. Linnet’s criticisms, Linnet’s neat derision, were really what she minded most, though she hesitated to admit so much, even to herself. The fact was that Lady Kilmichael was not very good at thinking clearly. As, the suburbs left behind, the train ran smoothly and steadily across Kent, fair and complacent in its thin April green, she tried to think where she had gone wrong with Linnet. And she could not contrive to accuse herself of much. Of course she knew that, broadly speaking, it is always the mother’s fault when daughters are ‘difficult,’ but really, what had she left undone or done amiss with the child? She could not see it; and, suspecting herself of moral stupidity, she relapsed into a vague sense of pain and failure.
They were familiar sensations. Walter had criticised and derided her, with a cool friendliness that was almost more wounding than real unkindness, for years. She had got accustomed to that from Walter. Of course he was very brilliant, and she was only just fairly intelligent, except in her own line. It was rather enervating, but she had more or less accepted it, from him. But when it came to trying to accept it from Linnet, her own child, she just couldn’t do it. The pain had become overwhelming. Why, if she was a failure, should she stay there to eat her humiliation like bread, day in and day out? Indignant tears sprang to her eyes. No! she was right to go.
Wiping her eyes behind The Times again – it would be awful to let a strange parson see her cry – she restored her pretty nose skilfully, and looked resolutely out of the window. It would really be better not to think of all these things in the train; they upset one, and it was part of her careful plan that neither she nor anyone else should appear in the least upset. While Walter made up his mind, everything was to seem quite normal. She began to read The Times once more; glancing vaguely down the social column, a paragraph caught her eye:
Lady Kilmichael has left England to visit her mother, Lady Grierson, at Antibes. No correspondence will be forwarded.
Oh! They had been very quick about putting it in. Well, it did look absolutely normal. And she had told Mother to expect her later, but that she was going to sketch a little first, wandering about as the whim took her. Gina had been told the same thing, and had willingly agreed to cope with Linnet; Mrs Hanbury liked and admired Linnet; she thought her strong-minded and intelligent, not like the usual run of vapid chits. And the servants had all been told the same story, and accepted it. Nobody knew – except Walter, who would know most definitely when he came back from New York next week and got her letter. But by then she would be clear away, in Dalmatia, which no one had ever heard of and where nobody ever went. She looked again at the decorous paragraph in The Times, with a certain satisfaction in the completeness of her arrangements. All perfectly normal.
But in her comfortable room at her Aunt Gina’s, Linnet was at that moment writing to her dearest friend as follows:
I’m here. Mums has gone abroad. She has given out that she is going to Gags at Antibes, but it’s my private belief that she has rootled off alone to paint somewhere, and that she won’t come back for a good long time. She and Poppy have got frightfully on each other’s nerves. This is to be kept entirely under your hat, and I know I can rely on you, but I think Mums has heard a bit too much lately about Our Mrs Barum. I don’t myself believe there’s anything in it, but Poppy is a most frightful fool about some things, and doesn’t seem to see that Mums might well think there was, the way he trails the woman round and parades her intelligence. Personally I don’t think women should be economists; it makes them awful to look at; and those professional women are nearly always the most frightful vamps at heart – haven’t you noticed it? I don’t know what means they use.
Poor Mums – I am sorry for her. She and Poppy are both darlings really, but so incompetent about one another. And really it will be a bit of a relief to be with Aunt G. this season. I don’t know why I find those two such a strain – Mums especially. She doesn’t interfere, she doesn’t cut one out with one’s boyfriends, like your hag of an Aunt does poor Angela; and she’s pretty good about one’s clothes and hair. I give her all that. But she watches one. I think what I can’t bear is her trying to say the right thing to me, and waiting to see if she has – and then thinking she hasn’t. Whereas Aunt G. doesn’t give a blow for me, or what I think or feel – so restful.
Thus casually, thus directly, the rising generation put its scarlet-tipped finger on the sorest secret spot in the older generation’s mind. On the Channel steamer, wrapped in a white coat of clipped lambskin, standing at the rail where the sea-wind made one’s eyes stream anyhow, Lady Kilmichael stared at the pearly receding buttresses of the English coast and thought about Mrs Barum and Walter. There is something about crossing the Channel which for people of a certain type (and especially for the non-seasick) promotes melancholy reflections, or deeper reflections anyhow. One leaves one’s home so definitely by sea! No crossing of a land frontier gives the same sense of severance. Those white cliffs, fading mistily behind her in the April sunshine, made Grace Kilmichael wonder if she were really leaving England for good.
It all depended on what Walter decided. If – if he really did care about Rose Barum, she wouldn’t stand in his way. It was so glaringly indecent to hold on to one’s husband if he wanted someone else. The trouble was that she didn’t know what Walter did want, and this was one of those questions you really couldn’t ask. Perhaps Walter would merely have said, coldly, that she had worked herself up. She ought to have been able to tell by observation, but she couldn’t bring herself to observe! She simply looked the other way – had been looking the other way for months now. And anyhow Walter was so undemonstrative, so terribly detached – he was a bad subject for observation. Rose Barum – her mind, in pain, shifted unwillingly to Rose Barum – she seemed a strange person to be attractive. In spite of her dark complexion – naughty Linnet would call her ‘the swarthy phenomenon,’ because Walter had once said that Mrs Barum’s brain was a phenomenon in a woman – she wasn’t a Jewess; only married to a Jew. That was the worst of being an economist, Lady Kilmichael thought – Jews sort of cropped up all round you. No – that was a Nazi way of thinking; she ought not to think that. She must be fair. Only Mrs Barum was really plain; and she was worse than plain, she was rather fat, and hadn’t the wits to realise that fat women ought to wear their clothes very loose, to look at all possible. Her sleeves! (Lady Kilmichael’s expression at that moment became one of very decided distaste – the irrational and unconscious contempt of the slender woman for the stout.) And her voice, so metallic and loud, enunciating facts about currency in dominating streams at the dinner table; and her jerky, abrupt manner. No one could imagine her the sort of person to attract Walter. But she was incredibly able, she worked like a horse, he said – no doubt she was very useful to him. He said that, and one must be fair.
Better not think about Mrs Barum either; it was really such a strain going on being fair. She strolled round the deck, went below and attended to her face, came on deck again. She was relieved when they manoeuvred into port, and she could think about the Customs and find her sleeper, and pay a huge tip to get it changed, because it was over the axle. The mere sound of French in her ears, the blue-bloused porters, lightened her mood, shifted her thoughts; the sight of the white notices on the long coaches, with names which led the mind right across Europe – Milan, Trieste, Beograd, Istanbul – gave her a little thrilled sense of space and travel. At least she was going to get far away from it all, and see lovely places.
Sitting in the dining car, eating a late lunch, she watched the landscape of North France, so simplified, so definite in its greenness and whiteness, with a clearer, a more Latin light over it than England knows, compose and recompose itself into pictures which in turns cried out to be painted. Oh, no wonder the French landscapists had got where they had – further than anyone else in the world! The very countryside would teach one to paint, in France. Well, now she would be able to paint, as much as she liked, and without perpetual teasing comments; as soon as she felt like it, she would get her things from Mother’s and begin again. But for the moment she would just rest, and content herself with those little line sketches of places, with a short paragraph of description, for which three American papers had made her such a startling contract. Another instance of the completeness of her arrangements, she thought, with a faint touch of complacency, that contract; for the next six months those two or three little sketches a week would cover her expenses anywhere she chose to go, and if by ill luck she did run into people, the contract would give her a marvellous excuse. It was wonderful to be so independent, at last. Not that she had ever lacked for anything, these last years – Walter gave her plenty of money; but he was so critical of how she spent it. Perhaps being an economist helped to make one economical.
Thinking about Walter, her complacency faded again. His attitude to her painting had made her really unhappy, because, look at it as she would, she could not make it seem generous; and she hated to think of Walter as ungenerous. She had been learning to be a painter when they married; he knew that, he knew it was her chosen profession. Of course she dropped it then; it was only when the boys were nearly grown up and Linnet at school, and they had become rich, and Walter himself was so often away in America or Australia, organising people’s currencies and things for them, that she had really begun again; very tentatively at first. How he had laughed when he heard that she was working at the Slade! Well, she didn’t mind that – at least, she was accustomed to it; it was his attitude to her success that she minded. For after two or three years at the Slade, and a few stolen periods in Moru’s atelier in Paris, Lady Kilmichael had had a prodigious, a wholly phenomenal success. Her first important picture, ‘Conversation Piece in a Garden’, after being hung on the line in the Salon, had been bought by a big Paris dealer and sold to the Metropolitan Museum in New York; her second, ‘Business as Usual’ (inspired by Walter and some financiers smoking cigars and discussing the Gold Standard in the garden at Netherstoke), had won the ‘Femina’ Gold Medal, and was now being exhibited on loan in Australia. She had had the luck to create a new fashion in pictures, which had ‘caught on’; she could, if she had chosen, have spent all her time now painting statesmen and beauties in their everyday clothes, beside their own herbaceous borders.
But she hadn’t chosen. That was why, she thought painfully, as she sat in the train, gazing out through fresh tears at the logically simple countryside of France, it was really unfair of Walter to have been so disagreeable about her success. She had kept her painting strictly subordinated to her main job, to being a wife and mother: entertaining economists for Walter, and chits for the boys; spending the holidays with them and with Linnet. It wasn’t as though she had neglected all that. And she had called herself ‘Grace Stanway’, her middle name, not Grace Kilmichael, and kept her growing fame hidden as well as she could. But Walter hadn’t shown the pleasure she expected at this success which had come on her like something out of a fairy tale; he had been tepid, he had been teasing. ‘Where is your Mother?’ she would hear him say to Linnet, in his rich cultivated voice, coming in – ‘in pursuit of Art, I suppose?’ ‘Well Grace, how are the masterpieces getting on?’ he would ask her. And that made her feel guilty; try as she would, she couldn’t free herself from her dependence on Walter’s judgement and on her family’s attitude. Even Linnet, in these last unhappy months, had teased her about her painting, been wittily derisive, following her Father’s example. The boys were merely indifferent, except to the benefits which flowed from her work. ‘Buck up and finish the old picture, Mums darling – I want a new car’ was their very uncomplicated line. They gazed dumbly at her work on the easel, but raced off to the Academy to count the crowds in front of it when it was hung, at last, there too. ‘Well done the jolly old public – you couldn’t get near Mum’s latest spot of horticulture,’ they would proclaim triumphantly on their return. ‘Do you like it, darling?’ she would say sometimes, wistfully, to Teddy, turning from a nearly completed canvas to wipe her fingers on a rag, when the first gong summoned her, distractingly, to get ready for luncheon. ‘Looks all right to me – when shall you finish it?’ Teddy would answer. ‘Buck up and clean yourself, Miss Stanway; you know you’re coming to Hurlingham this afternoon,’ he would say, pushing her towards the door. Oh, the boys were rather sweet – a smile crept round her faintly, correctly reddened mouth at the thought of the boys; they weren’t very interested, but there was no edge on their teasing.
So all across France, lying more picture-like than ever in the deepening afternoon light, she continued her reminiscent argument with herself; now wondering, with Walter as with Linnet, how she was in fault, where she had gone wrong, how failed him, to bring things to this unhappy pass, now thinking with faint resentment that she had done all she could; till the white dome of the Sacré Coeur loomed up on the hill above the city’s haze, like a snow-mountain or a gigantic pearl, and she knew that they were nearing Paris. She looked at it with the usual emotions – astonishment at its beauty, its height, and pleasure at the mere thought it always brought of being again in Paris, which she loved. She looked at her watch – there might just be time to get round to Rosenthal’s Gallery and see those new things of Gillani’s. She rang the bell for the sleeping-car attendant and told him that she would rejoin the train at the Gare de Lyon. The attendant, remembering the tip he had received at Boulogne, bowed and promised to lock Madame’s carriage.
As Lady Kilmichael walked out through the Nord station to get a taxi, she looked as little like the common conception of an artist as can well be imagined. Her dark clothes were of that distinguished simplicity, so unobtrusive as almost to render the wearer invisible, which well-bred women affect for the street; only her height and slenderness marked her out in any way from any hundred of other well-dressed, quietly good-looking, grey-eyed Englishwomen, with nice complexions and faultless hair. While the taxi rattled through the sunny streets of Paris, noisy with a different noise, busy with a different liveliness from the streets of London, she sniffed the air, with its burden of unwonted smells, and her spirits rose a little. Delicious Paris! And it would be nice to see Gillani’s stuff. But at the Rosenthal Gallery disappointment awaited her. The doors were closed; a vast limousine glittered, rich and sombre, before them. As she turned away, with the curious sense of incredulity which attends an unexpected disappointment, the door half-opened, and a short elderly man, with a grizzled well-trimmed beard and pince-nez, came out. He glanced at her, looked again, brightened into a positive effulgence of delighted recognition and came up to her, hat in hand. ‘Mademoiselle Stanway! Quel plaisir inattendu!’ With a start she recognised M. Breuil, the dealer who occupied himself, to use his own phrase, with her pictures.
M. Breuil was one of those dealers who are something more than the mere name implies. He was something of a critic and a genuine connoisseur as well; he had a gallery of his own; he discovered painters, and if he thought well, ‘made’ them. He had discovered and ‘made’ Miss Stanway, rescuing her work from the degrading nullity of the Salon and placing it with success in select shows of modern art in his own gallery, and in London; he sold it cleverly. He knew quite well that it was not absolutelyfirst-class – if it had been, it would have been far harder to sell; but she had the gift, undoubtedly, Mlle Stanway; she was a very fluent artist; and he had made of her a person to be reckoned with. She did far too little work – but that, too, kept prices up. M. Breuil himself was emphatically also a person to be reckoned with. Now, as he stood talking to Lady Kilmichael on the steps of Rosenthal’s, while his immense limousine purred below, other late departers from the gallery pointed him out to one another in respectful undertones – ‘C’est le vieux Breuil, celui-là aux cheveux gris’; and ‘Tiens!’ said their hearers, impressed.
M. Breuil was charmed to see ‘Miss Stanway.’ He had a great deal to say, and said it very fast indeed, in rather charming guttural tones. He had no idea that she was in Paris; she must come tomorrow and see how well ‘Afternoon Tea’ looked in his new show; it was having a success formidable and unheard-of – moreover, he had a lot of commissions for her. Could she lunch with him tomorrow? It was some time before Lady Kilmichael could get in enough words at a stretch to make him understand that she was not, strictly speaking, in Paris at all, but passing through – leaving, indeed, in under three hours. At this desolating intelligence M. Breuil became Napoleonic. In that case, he said, leading her down the steps, they must at once talk business; shepherding her into the car, he swept her off to his gallery for a glass of sherry; drinking the sherry, still talking to her, he nevertheless contrived to convey to his factotum precise instructions about a restaurant, a table and an early dinner of three courses. And would she, he asked, allow him also to invite Count Schiaparelli? Who was insistent, determined, that he must have a Stanway of his wife, his son and his daughter-in-law, in their miraculous garden outside Tours.
Lady Kilmichael declined the Count, with unusual firmness. She was tired, her toilette was unsuitable, her plans uncertain. M. Breuil must tell her about it, and she would think, and write. Then a picture caught her eye, and she rose and went over to it, glass in hand – surely, she said, this was someone new? And immediately she was engulfed in the delightful business of appreciating, criticising, seeing and enjoying the work of others, with a very acute connoisseur beside her. Back again in this happy familiar world, all her faculties expanded; here she was not stupid or a failure; the ferocity with which M. Breuil controverted some of her opinions was in itself the sincerest flattery. And there was plenty of the more direct thing too. Over the very perfect little dinner to which the limousine presently bore them off, M. Breuil told her of the advance in her latest work, the greater fluidity and smoothness in her grouping, the more assured treatment of the figures and characterisation. ‘Cela avance – de toile en toile, il y a des progrès – même très marqués,’ he averred. And now, in Italy, what was she going to paint? How many pictures would she do? He had a little plan – for a one-man show of her work next winter, in his smaller gallery, combined with a big show – a collection of the later Impressionists. The collection was an important one; to be associated with it would advertise her yet more; success was assured, ‘mais cela rehaussera encore plus les prix’; buyers would be there from all over the world. (M. Breuil was a man of business as well as a connoisseur.)
He was, therefore, the more shocked at his client’s vagueness and unpracticalness when she told him that for the next few weeks she did not mean to paint. ‘Pas une toile!’ she declared, to his horror. The little sketches for the American papers he derided as sheer waste of time – ‘à moins que vous ne travaillez un peu votre architecture. C’est là que vous manquez un peu de force, d’assurance.’ But she must rest, she told him – later on, presently, she would paint again – might even come back to Paris to do the Schiaparelli family. Ah well, to rest, M. Breuil understood the necessity; he too was surmené; his bronchitis had afflicted him this winter; he was going on a cruise, very soon – ‘le médecin y insiste.’ To sustain her on her journey, he made the maître d’hôtel put up a special flask of ’75 brandy; when they arrived at the station the factotum was waiting at the door of her coach with an immense bouquet of white orchids and red roses. M. Breuil kissed her hand in farewell, and the sleeping-car attendant ushered her, flowers and all, into her sleeper. Lady Kilmichael, sitting down, suddenly caught sight of The Times lying on the seat. She remembered how she had hidden her tears behind it only that morning, in the train from Victoria. Oddly enough, she did not feel in the least like crying now.
TWO
The great figure of the Madonna dominates the apse of the basilica at Torcello, her black draperies sweeping downwards across the golden mosaic curve of the semi-dome, mosaic tears falling down her pale and tragic face. The figure is so vast, its unrelieved black so solitary, there in the golden dome, as to make it one of the most moving things in the world. So Grace Kilmichael thought, sitting in the empty church staring at it, her Ruskin in her hand; she found herself pondering on why Ruskin, who was so moved by Torcello, had so caught the whole touching wonder of the place, should have devoted pages to the pulpit, and barely mentioned the Virgin! She had been reading the great chapter that morning as she rowed across from Venice in a gondola, past Murano, past Burano; now looking ahead to the pale confusion of low shores and dim hills, now looking backwards to the outline of Venice itself, a clear tracery of spires and domes etched above the floor of the sea. People could make fun of Ruskin as much as they liked, but if some of his art criticism was nonsense, it was noble nonsense, and that chapter one of the great splendours of English prose. Book in hand, she had spent the morning wandering round the island and climbing the Campanile, trying to make the neat buildings of today – the small Museum, the house which proffers coffee down on the narrow fondamento where the gondolas tie up – fit in with the desolation which Ruskin found and described. She couldn’t do it, really – except for the two churches, it was all too different; and presently she gave up the attempt and simply surrendered herself to the lost and lazy charm of the place – the wild rosemary scenting the muddy shores, the wild asparagus feathering over the still waters of the narrow inlets, the peasants cutting hay in the scraps of meadow between the buildings. The scythe-blades sweeping down the small bright familiar flowers, among fragments of stone and marble carved in strange shapes, gave her an idea for a picture, and she made one or two careful studies – it was really a pity she had brought no painting things, sent them all to Antibes. If only she had even some watercolours to make notes! While she sketched, the peasants came and looked on, and said ‘Molto bene!’ loudly and cheerfully; a very old man, warming his frail body in the sun, leant on a stick beside her and told her that he was over ninety. Lady Kilmichael, sketching away, gave him a lira and a cigarette, and told him that her children’s Nonno was of the same age; she felt warmly to the old man, he reminded her of Walter’s father, whom she loved dearly.
Now and again a motor launch arrived from Venice, and the sunny isolation of this quiet friendly place was broken by an influx of tourists, who were swept breathlessly through both churches, through the museum, and off again. They appeared to be allowed forty minutes in which to ‘do’ Torcello. Each time, when they had gone, and only the voices of the peasants and the swish of the scythes broke the sunny stillness, Lady Kilmichael settled down into a deepened sense of contentment. She had been here for hours, and felt almost an inhabitant compared to the tourists on the launches. Altogether, that morning, she was content. This journey was being rather a success. Tucked away in an obscure pension overlooking the Giudecca, she had evaded all acquaintances; even her friend Lady Roseneath, who had a Palazzo on the Grand Canal in which she collected all visitors to Venice. She had had a narrow escape, though, from Lady Roseneath one day, in the Merceria; and only saved herself by nipping very swiftly into a small dark shop, and bending her head over a counterful of brightly coloured braces, till all danger was past. She had spent a happy week, sightseeing, pottering and sketching; Venice was marvellous, her freedom more marvellous still. And the paintings! How small, as an artist, they made one feel! Her little trumpery people in their bright garden settings, nothing to them but the contrast of their modernity of clothes and attitude with the perennial, the timeless and effortless perfection of the flowers – what were they in comparison to the maturity of conception exhibited by these grave Madonnas and wise-lipped Doges? Feeling small, Grace Kilmichael felt happy – she was like that; especially since there was nothing personal in the noble superiority of Tintoretto and Bellini, no deliberate putting of her down. And remembering some laughing flick of Walter’s, she would wince then – but catching sight of another glorious picture, she would forget Walter and go and stand before it, lost in pleasure.
The freedom was really the most astonishing part. When she had ricked her neck for some time examining a ceiling panel, one day in the Ducal Palace, she noticed an elderly German in spectacles quietly lying on his back on the floor, observing the ceiling in comfort. Lady Kilmichael had not the courage to follow his example there and then, but she went early next morning, when the place was nearly empty, and rather timidly lay down on her back. It was perfect! One rested, and one saw. And no one paid the smallest attention. So, unhurried and unscolded, Lady Kilmichael lay down all over Venice to gaze at ceilings – and whenever she did so she tasted her freedom triumphantly. For what would Walter or Linnet have said?
But when she had eaten a belated lunch at Torcello, in a sunny corner, and went to look at the church, somehow or other the sight of the great Madonna had dimmed her contentment, and brought back the recollection of her private disquiets. Sitting there now, forgetting Ruskin and his views on pulpits, she thought of Walter. Walter must be back by now – back for two or three days. He would have got her letter. She wondered what he would make of it – what his answer would be. A sudden chill of fear ran over her, startling her by its violence – suppose he did take her at her word, and ended the thing? For a moment her world rocked about her – her safe, her accustomed world, of the boys and Linnet, and Walter and his tiresomeness and his amusingness, the whole fabric of her life. To lose all that was not conceivable. And in her panic she felt that she had been mad to write, mad to come away.
She pulled herself together presently, and summoned pride to her aid. No – if Walter wanted Rose Barum or really couldn’t bear her, Grace, she was better away. She would wait, and not write – do nothing, let it all slide. She was very happy here, she told herself – happier than she had been for years. She would not worry. And she began to study the Madonna again, conscientiously. But the Madonna is not the best of companions for wives and mothers who have abandoned their families – immense, still, sorrow-stricken and quietly accepting sorrow, there she stands – timeless, the mother who cannot escape her motherhood, and would not if she could. And looking at her, Lady Kilmichael, instead of thinking about Byzantine tendencies in art, as she had meant to do, began to think about Linnet. She hoped the child was happy with Gina, and Gina being reasonably careful about what she did – not letting her motor too wildly with that headlong Herbert boy, in his car with the long nose – she didn’t really at all like that boy; and discouraging her from going to dinner without her stockings in the wrong houses – at Lady Netherhampton’s, for example. Darling Linnet! She was so lovely and so sweet, but she knew so little, really. Oh, how she hoped she was all right.
Lady Kilmichael was at all times subject to these rushes of maternal feeling, even unprompted by the presence of the Madonna; and they generally issued in an impulse to do something for one of the children. But the older children get, the more difficult it is to find anything which they really at all want done for them, and the enfeebled impulse is liable to be finally extinguished in a letter – frequently a letter which arouses a faint, if amused, irritation in the recipient. The Edwardian mother who wrote to her soldier son, sitting fever-ridden and solitary among his black troops in the jungles of Nigeria –‘I hope, my dearest boy, you aren’t going in for too much of that horrid betting and gambling,’ has her parallels today, and closer home.
Lady Kilmichael, however, was fortunate in finding almost at once, and even in so improbable a place as Torcello, something which she could do, not for Linnet, but for Nigel. Emerging from the high-lit chill of the basilica into the hot and brilliant sunshine outside, she went round with a vague intention of making a drawing of the apse – pottered through the priest’s garden, where among the trim fruit trees and beds of salads she found no quite appropriate position for a sketch, and so passed out into the grassy meadow beyond. There, having found the perfect aspect, she looked about for something to sit on among the fragments of marble heaped casually at the edge of the field. And there, to her immense astonishment, she came on one of Nigel’s stones. It was a long narrow piece of greyish pietra dura, broken off at one end, and carved throughout its length in a curious intricate scroll pattern of flat thongs plaited and twisted in and out of one another, like immensely elaborate basketwork, forming a general design of squares, circles and triangles. It was, so far as Lady Kilmichael could see, exactly like the patterns on those incised tomb slabs and crosses of the Western Highlands of which Nigel was always making rubbings on linen and ‘squeezes’ in Barcelona paper. Nigel was a good deal of an archaeologist, and some of his mother’s happiest days had been spent under the sycamores and ash trees of small lonely West Highland churchyards, clearing the turf and nettles off half-buriedstones, scrubbing them clean with a brush and the bucket out of the Minister’s kitchen; or on windy days holding the length of calico down firmly, while Nigel rubbed and rubbed with a piece of cobbler’s wax. But she had always been led to suppose that these stones were peculiar to the West Coast of Scotland and the Isle of Man, save for a few Irish crosses showing the same type of design – and here in Italy, at Torcello, she suddenly found one of the most familiar patterns of all. She could not be mistaken – she had seen far too many rubbings, scrubbed far too many stones herself. It was most surprising and unexpected. Nigel would be thrilled. But knowing Nigel’s Cambridge caution, she realised that nothing short of ocular demonstration would convince him; and abandoning the apse, she sat down on a broken capital covered with acanthus leaves, and began to make a sketch of the scroll-work stone, happy again to be doing something for one of the children.
But while Lady Kilmichael was sketching in Torcello, Linnet in London was again writing to her best friend:
I’m sure I was right about Mums, and that there is some funny business going on. For one thing, she hasn’t written, and you know how terrifically they write as a rule. And when Poppy got back the other day, he came flying round here in no end of a well-restrained flap – Where’s your Mother? I told him she’d gone to Gags, though I didn’t believe it; and as a matter of fact she hasn’t. Because when I popped in yesterday for some clothes, Grimes said, Would I take a foreign telegram for the master over the instrument? – silly old porpoise, he’s getting so deaf, he’s useless on the telephone. And it was from Gags – ‘Expecting Grace any day, but no address.’ So you see he must have wired. Meanwhile I gather our Rose is holding his hand – Grimes asked if I should be staying to lunch, and when I asked if Poppy was alone, he made his super-butler face and said ‘Mrs Barum was expected.’ So I beat it. How I loathe that woman! I hope Mums will have the guts to stick it out for a good long time, till she gets rubbed off; I can’t believe that will last forever. But Mums is so terribly soft – and I daresay that fidgets Poppy just like it does me.
The drawing of the stone took longer than Grace Kilmichael expected. It was extraordinarily difficult to get all those complicated interlacings correct. As she sat concentrated on her work, she was made vaguely aware of the arrival of yet another launch by a distant swirl of tourists round the two churches, and of voices in the distance other than the pleasant nasal tones of the peasants. But the tourists seldom came round the east end of the basilica, and she was startled when someone close by said – ‘I beg your pardon, but could you bear to shift for a moment?’
She looked up. A young man without a hat, holding a tripod camera in one hand, was standing a few yards behind her.
‘I want to get the apse from just here, and a figure in front will dwarf it,’ said the young man explanatorily. ‘Do you mind?’ He was civil, but not particularly apologetic, she noticed; he spoke in a peculiar impersonal, rather drawling tone.
‘No, of course not,’ she said, rising and moving away. But it was getting late, and she wanted to go on with her drawing; she began to tug at the piece of carved stone, to shift it to another position, out of the camera’s line of fire. ‘Here, let me help,’ said the young man abruptly, and together they lifted the stone a few feet to one side, and Lady Kilmichael sat down to work again. The young man, as she did so, glanced at her sketchbook, and then at the stone. ‘You’ve got that wrong,’ he said, in that same impersonal voice; ‘look – here’ – he touched the drawing with his finger.
‘Oh, so I have,’ said Lady Kilmichael. ‘Thank you.’ She rubbed that piece out, and began it afresh, while the young man paced, and peered, and clicked; she assumed that the interruption was over. But presently he came up to her again.
‘I’ll put it back for you now,’ he said.
‘Oh no, thank you – it’s all right here,’ she answered.
‘But I want to get another from this side,’ said the young man, in the same explanatory and unapologetic manner, ‘and a figure dwarfs it completely.’
‘Oh, very well,’ said Lady Kilmichael – he was rather an offhand young man, she thought, though his clothes and speech appeared to belong to the class to which she was accustomed. While he moved the stone back to its old place, she looked at him more carefully. He was very young, probably not more than twenty-two, she decided, with blue eyes and a mop of curly straw-coloured hair; his face was burned a bright raspberry pink by the sun, a most unbecoming combination; in addition, this youthful face, which should have been cheerful, wore a markedly dissatisfied expression. He was not a very taking person, she felt. But while Lady Kilmichael looked at the young man, the young man, when she reseated herself amid mutual and rather cold thanks, looked at her sketchbook. ‘You’ve got it wrong again,’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you see? That one goes under, not over – and then out here – look, so.’
‘So it does. How stupid of me,’ said Lady Kilmichael, blushing a little – she still blushed, in spite of her forty-two years, when anything embarrassed her. She set to work once more, while the dissatisfied young man returned to his photography; the stone was a horrible thing to draw – it was more like mathematics than anything else, with all those interlacing lines. When she got one right, it made another come wrong. However, that was better now. She held her sketchbook away, examining it – and suddenly found the young man by her side.
‘No, I’m not going to ask you to move any more,’ he said, with a faint grin. ‘I’ve done now. I came to say Thank you.’ He glanced at the drawing and then at the stone. ‘Oh, but look here,’ he burst out, ‘now you haven’t got it right! This is hopeless!’ He pulled out a pencil, and taking the book from her, drew a couple of lines rapidly. ‘There – like that – and here – so.’
Lady Kilmichael watched him ‘I can’t think why I can’t get it right,’ she said rather regretfully, watching his assured strokes.
‘Nor can I,’ said the young man, looking as he spoke at the stone – ‘perhaps you’re not accustomed to drawing. Oh – you’ve got that bit wrong too. Shall I do it for you?’ he said, looking now at her. ‘It won’t take me long, and these things are no good unless they’re done accurately.’
Lady Kilmichael agreed to both these propositions, and the young man sat down and began to draw the stone with quick, careful strokes – dotting, measuring and planning as he went. Grace looked on, a little envious of his precision, a little amused at his suggestion that she was not accustomed to drawing. He was an odd creature – so young, so self-assured. She noticed that the shadows were lengthening; the air was getting cooler, and the marshy smell of the inlets came strongly to them as they sat; it would soon be time to be starting back, she thought regretfully. Several times she heard an impatient hooting from beyond the churches, but she paid no attention, and presently it ceased. The young man, too, found the stone a bit of a teaser, it seemed; even he had to make one or two erasures – it took him longer than she expected. But at last it was done to his satisfaction, and he gave her back the book. While she thanked him, he glanced at his watch.
‘Lord! The launch!’ he exclaimed in dismay. ‘It should have gone half an hour ago.’ And before she could utter a word he snatched up his camera and was off, running like a deer across the meadow, till he disappeared round the corner of the basilica.
Lady Kilmichael followed more slowly, feeling guilty. Probably those hoots had represented the cluckings of the launch over its lost passenger. She had never thought of that at the time. Sure enough, when she got down to the fondamento no launch was visible, and the young man was standing disconsolate in the centre of a gesticulating group which included her two gondolieri. ‘It’s gone – and it seems it was the last today,’ he said as she approached – and now his red face under the yellow hair looked not only dissatisfied but tragic.
‘You can come back with me – I have a gondola,’ said Lady Kilmichael.
‘How long will that take?’ the young man asked gloomily.
Two hours, she told him.
‘My miserable aunt! I shall be late for dinner again,’ he said, more gloomily than ever. ‘I was late yesterday too,’ he added.
Lady Kilmichael was not sure whether the ‘miserable aunt’ was a person or an ejaculation, but did not ask. She apologised and commiserated, but there was nothing to be done; it was already nearly seven and nothing could get the young man back to Venice in time for dinner at eight. ‘Well, I must lump it,’ he said dejectedly. And then all of a sudden something in the whole situation seemed to amuse him. He put his head on one side, looked full at Lady Kilmichael, and laughed. ‘What a happy day!’ he said.
THREE
Italians have the amiable trait of always being willing to do a fellow tradesman a good turn at someone else’s expense, and this was doubtless the motive which prompted Giovanni, the gondolier, to suggest to Lady Kilmichael that before leaving the Signora should take a cup of coffee at the little trattoria just across the inlet from the landing stage. ‘Good idea,’ said the young man when she put this suggestion to him.
Grace was hungry, and glad of his concurrence; they would not get back to Venice much before nine in any case. Giovanni poled them across the few yards of still water, shattering the reflections of the white buildings, the pink roofs and the soft green hedges of tea plant which bordered the little inlet, to the inn, where they sat under a trellis of vines in the garden. It was very still; the water lapped against the stonework below them; further down the inlet a moorhen paddled across from the greenery on one side to the greenery on the other; when the disturbance created by the gondola’s passage had subsided, the pinkish shape of Santa Fosca, with its roof of rayed tiles so nearly matching its delicate small bricks, re-formed itself, still moving very gently, on the clear surface. While they waited for their coffee the young man looked consideringly at his companion, and said ‘Why did you want a drawing of that particular stone?’
Lady Kilmichael explained about West Highland tomb slabs, and how exciting and extraordinary it was to find one of those patterns carved on a stone in Torcello. ‘Of course this bit is only a detail, really – as a rule the tombstones have a sword down the middle for a man, or a cross for an ecclesiastic, with this scrolly stuff at the sides; and sometimes there’s a galley at the foot, or a book and shears. And the later ones even have figures, and animals, like stags and hounds.’ She further explained how, without calico, it was impossible to make a rubbing, as she would have liked to do. The young man seemed interested in all she had to say, and asked several rather intelligent questions. Of what date were the stones? Oh, fifteenth or sixteenth century, as a rule, she told him; but unless there was an inscription, as on MacMillan’s Cross, they were very hard to date with any accuracy. Eventually – ‘I suppose you are an archaeologist,’ he said, again considering her with his head on one side. Sitting there under the trellis, with the low sun casting blue shadows from the vine leaves on her white dress, Lady Kilmichael looked no more like an archaeologist than like an artist; she had taken off her hat, and her hair, a little ruffled by the light breeze, lay in brown waves, untouched with grey, round her face; her interest in the subject of the stones had made her open her eyes very wide – she looked both pretty and animated. But she disclaimed archaeology – ‘I wanted it for my son – he’s the archaeologist. I don’t really know anything about it.’
‘You seem to know rather a lot,’ said the young man. Still looking at her – ‘Where’s your son at school?’ he asked.
‘He isn’t at school – he’s at Cambridge.’
The young man’s face of astonishment at this announcement made her laugh – a rather nice low laugh. The young man, however, did not even smile – he continued to contemplate her with unmoved gravity and said ‘Well, you don’t look it,’ rather repressively. While they drank their coffee he asked if she had found any other fragments of the same sort of pattern elsewhere in Torcello. No – she had been all round both the basilica and Santa Fosca, and had seen no traces of it. ‘What about the Museum?’ he asked.
Lady Kilmichael had not been to the Museum. This the young man thought wrong – there were some good things in the Museum. ‘Let’s just look round there, before we go – shall we?’ he said. So they called to Giovanni, and were poled back, breaking up the reflections again. The Museum was by now closed, and the custodian trimming roses in his garden – but he was easily persuaded to reopen it when the young man, in fluent Italian, represented that the Signora was a noted archaeologist, giving her another fleeting grin as he did so. When he grinned his face lost its dissatisfied look, and became rather attractive, in spite of the deplorable combination of his red skin and yellow hair. They went in, and in the fading light gazed at the various objects, mostly Roman, which were set out in the small rooms – but there were no scroll-work patterns to be seen. Presently Lady Kilmichael came to a halt before something – the young man, who had been wandering about by himself, came up to see what she had found. ‘Is that some of it?’ he asked.
It was not. It was a small cinerary urn, with an inscription in lovely clear Roman lettering between two graceful wreaths. A piece was broken out of the top, so that the first two lines were incomplete. Standing by her, the young man read it:
‘OLIM N … NATI SUM … NUNC QUIETI SUMUS UT FUIMUS CURA RELICTA, VALE ET TU’
It dated from the second century.
‘I must copy that,’ said Lady Kilmichael suddenly. But she had left her sketchbook in the gondola. ‘I’ll do it – I’ve got a book,’ said the young man; ‘perhaps I’d better,’ he added, and grinned at her again. He pulled a small sketchbook out of his pocket, and copied the inscription, imitating the lettering, she observed, very beautifully and carefully. She stood looking on, thinking how odd he was, with his discontented face and his extraordinary assurance – she had never met anyone who asked questions so freely; she was afraid that he would ask her why she wanted that inscription copied, that he would laugh at her if she told him, and that she would feel a fool if she did not. But when he had finished he did not ask her anything – he put away his book, she tipped the custodian, and they went down and took their places in the gondola. Giovanni and his second oarsman pushed off, and once more the image of Santa Fosca in the still water was broken by their passage, while Grace Kilmichael looked her last at the beautiful reality on the shore – the lovely slope of the low roofs against the central lantern, the delicate brickwork, the slender arches and pillars – all in that strange shade of brownish pink, like a peach stone, enriched now by the evening light almost to rose colour. The young man gazed too, his face no longer discontented, but almost sad. It was only when they had passed down the inlet into the main channel leading out to the lagoon, and of all the buildings of Torcello only the Campanile showed above the grey shores, that he spoke. ‘Do you mind telling me why you wanted that thing copied?’
A certain hesitancy with which the question was put surprised Lady Kilmichael – in her surprise she answered at once, truthfully: ‘I had an idea that I should like the last part on my tombstone.’
The young man stared at her in silence for some moments. Then he looked away, out to the low blue horizons opening in front, to left, to right of them, as they emerged into the lagoon; when he spoke, he appeared to be addressing the distant silhouette of Burano far ahead. ‘O Care left behind, to thee also farewell,’ he said – ‘not a bad epitaph at all.’ He turned to her again – ‘Why do you know Latin?’ he asked, as if to change the subject.
‘My Father liked us to know it,’ said Lady Kilmichael. ‘He said it was the only way to understand the difference between the classical and the romantic in literature,’ she added, unnecessarily. Something in the way that question about the inscription had been asked and answered had put her almost at her ease with the strange young man; his grave considering silence on the subject of her taking farewell of Care had a curious – sensitiveness was perhaps the word – about it which made her suddenly feel almost confident in speaking to him.
Now it was something quite new for Grace Kilmichael to feel in the least secure or at her ease with the young, either male or female. Like so many women of her generation, in her heart she was afraid of them. Youth nowadays has many weapons in its armoury with which to defeat middle age. The young – usually with great charm, and (outside one’s own family) invariably with the utmost civility – tolerated middle age perhaps, were courteous to it, but left it feeling that they despised both it and its methods; they dismissed its sanctities with gay derision, quite unaware that they were holy – laughed their way through secret shrines of which the stricken owners were too shy even to acknowledge the existence. With all their charm and courtesy, the young contrived to make you feel small – and if you loved them, wounded you. All this had puzzled and troubled Grace Kilmichael for some time, and lately, on account of Linnet, more than ever. She did not fawn upon the young, like many of her contemporaries – partly out of a sort of moral fastidiousness, partly because she was too shy to make advances; she was friendly and kind to them, but she never felt that she really understood them, and had latterly decided that she need never hope to.
