A Man of Genius (13 page)

The stern Duke of Wellington, who'd vanquished Napoleon for decent English values so short a time ago, must have shuddered at this inelegant and lewd display by his unappetising royal masters. It was amusing all of Europe.

In the ups and downs of the water passage she learned of Significant Things. The Princess, it seemed, had travelled by night, bumping her short fat body for eight hours at a time. Then she'd
rested in the heat of the day – on a Turkish
sofa
in a tent. All England and half the Continent lolled on this sofa.

A serious query: did it have bedclothes on it? Did she remove her skirts and shift to lie there? If she did undress, was she under a blanket? On or under?

Ann's eyes flickered over the rest of the news-sheet. A few current events, some naval skirmishes off Cyprus but almost all just naughty secrets revealed, the insalubrious spectacle of a great country delving into the intimate life of a woman no worse than her persecutor.

By the time she arrived on La Giudecca she was less disgusted. With such disarming details of sofas and blankets and undergarments, the account made her countrymen rather lovable, comic even. Most of the testimony came from Italians, and the gullible English lapped it up like innocent puppy dogs.

Caroline. The name had lodged in her brain. The Princess was an entertaining fantasy as much as Byron's Giaour or Corsair. Her Caroline was not so different now, her coloured shawls and turbans registering in her daughter's mind like the royal sofa. Had she been married like the unfortunate Princess? For sure there'd been a coupling and a child born. Legitimate or a child of passion? A child of passion from Caroline? A likely tale!

Anyway, a child of old age. Too old, too old for the cooing and dangling young girls do with babies. She'd been bored by an infant. She said so. Had she wanted a son or perhaps a beautiful daughter to admire her? Or no child at all? The whole thing a horrid accident.

All this oppressing memory from the consonance of names. What had Caroline to do with the Princess? And what had Robert to do with Caroline and father Gilbert that they so often now reared up where his presence was everything?

Entering ungreeted into the apartment, she saw herself as a bat in the morning air with no sense of the night's resting place. She sat on the bed and let all her mental monsters cruise about her head.

17

I
n a town so attuned to the coming of the plague, the pest in all its forms, the cholera, the putrid typhus, the great and small pox and all manner of water-borne diseases, there was always awareness of bodies. No wonder Venice was known for its gorgeous fabrics. Mostly only the face – though this, too, was so often masked – discovered the otherwise hidden distemper.

Robert had become familiar with Italians on the island and across the canal, even with some foreigners. He was not particular. People greeted him in the
calli
and the
campi
more than they did Ann. Did his face tell them there was something wrong? He didn't look conventionally fevered, yet he had a feverish quality. Perhaps liking his affability, they failed to notice his increasing nerviness. Probably – if they thought at all about a stranger – they judged it typical of the English.

She too had changed. She'd become almost gaunt, with some strands of grey in her chestnut-coloured hair, though she was still far from forty. It didn't matter. She had no audience.

One day beyond the Rialto by the newly opened Jewish ghetto, where she'd gone to buy some cheap Marseilles soap, she spied him at a distance. He was standing smoking, leaning on a parapet wall and gazing along a small canal. What could he be doing by the ghetto? Even from where she was she could see that his body was twitching nervously. Though his frame was ample, there was now little flesh on it except where the belly swelled forward unhealthily. He was not what he had been in London, that sturdy being so present in himself.

Then some weeks later she'd been sitting alone at a table in a small
campo
north of San Marco in deep shade, her back against a cracked stuccoed wall. On the opposite sunny side, Robert was with a group of men. He had a sty in his eye which irritated him in the apartment but here simply rendered him purblind. By the look of their clothes the men with him were local labourers; Robert was throwing at them words in Italian they couldn't understand while making wide gestures. One man outlined the shape of a voluptuous woman with his hands and moved his thighs. They all laughed.

What was it that made others come to Robert? She had not a tenth of such power; had she been turned into a man she would still not have had it. What gave some people influence to pull others towards them – even if they burnt them when close – while others, all well-meaning and eager, stood solitary?

Another unkempt man joined them, greeting Robert in English. An artist, for he held a large easel from which dangled the torso of a skeleton. His voice carried across the
campo
. Robert spoke in a lower tone but she could still hear something of his words; her mind filled in gaps.

‘I am sick of the town and its cursed women,' said the artist.

‘Women are a curse,' agreed Robert. ‘They cling like limpets out of malice.'

‘Bitches on heat,' said the artist. ‘I married a whore, fucked her too often and got two brats. Along with a whole family of maggoty sisters and aunts.' He rattled the bones. ‘Look at this skeleton. It's a woman, the bit you need. I can put this cunt wherever I want. That's how it should be.'

He produced a bottle of liquor from his deep pocket. The owner of the table couldn't have approved but perhaps he'd already made enough on his wine to allow indifference – or wanted no trouble from drunken strangers.

‘I was trepanned into coming here, lugged over the Alps. For what? I've been so cursedly stupid.'

Where had this hatred come from? She'd loved him in part because he treated her as an equal, was immune to difference, finding (she'd thought) no sex in souls and minds.

Like her father in philosophical rather than romantic mode – according to Caroline – like utopian William Bates, like thin needy Gregory Lloyd, so many men. Did any of them truly deliver? Here before her this easy misogyny was trotting out as man's second nature.

Then she heard the name Bianca,
cara Bianca
, and a guttural laugh from the artist. She was sure, no, not sure exactly.

Another woman? It couldn't be.

But of course it could. Robert was often away much of the day and into the night. What did he do? Just because she'd seen his slow decay, the waning of capacity for pleasure with her, didn't mean others who'd not known him in the past couldn't be attracted. She of all people understood how he might appeal.

A vile and muddled jealousy seized her, so that she almost got up and broke cover. But she stayed still. For if she were seen now that they were half-drunk – the labourers had just left the two foreigners at the table – there would surely be a public brawl of words. More?

How could he keep such low company? She'd never heard him speak so coarsely in England, not even within his circle of drinking men. Had these ruffians replaced the scholars and writers of London, Richard Perry, John Humphries, bluff Frederick Curran, all of them clever men? Had brilliant John Taylor given way to this rattler of bones?

Cara Bianca
? Maybe she'd heard something else altogether. She let the name dance round her head as she kept herself in the shade until they were gone. She was sodden with self-pity.

By the time she reached the apartment on La Giudecca she'd resolved to eradicate the name, making it an ear's error. Perhaps he'd said
carabinier
and her demented mind had translated it into what she feared.

Why fear? How could this be something to unsettle her? The relief she'd once felt at no more strained and irritable attempts in bed had dissipated long ago; but there was a difference between knowing Robert worn dry for her, and being replaced.

In the apartment he made no mention of an artist with a skeleton's
torso. Indeed he hardly mentioned anything of his life outside. They rarely talked. Yet one day he'd spoken of a Signor Balbi, a distinguished man, a traveller – a cultured, patriotic Venetian, friend apparently of Signor Verezzi. She couldn't place the name at once. Then remembered. The Savelli dinner.

Cultured and patriotic? In the past he'd never have coupled these words. Was it meant as a reproach to her and her friend Giancarlo Scrittori?

This Signor Balbi had taken him to see the painting of a hornless rhinoceros brought from India by a Dutch captain to exhibit in cities through Europe. In the picture a young man held high the creature's horn, its animalhood, the aphrodisiac, while the poor mutilated beast munched glumly on dry straw. The painting had upset Robert but he'd contained himself with Signor Balbi. Look at yourselves, he'd wanted the rhinoceros to shout, this noble plated animal, so different from all others. Made into a raree show by dullards! Such is the fate of the extraordinary in the ordinary world.

To her, though she never saw the painting, it held a different message. The creature was called Clara. She was exhibited unmasked, unclothed, while the men who watched and exploited her were hidden behind a panoply of power and arrogance.

Apart from Signor Balbi, she knew well how Robert's standards for company had fallen. The Italian labourers, even a dilapidated artist, might be explained, but not the English visitors, the kind of insufferable boobies he'd caricatured in the old days, mercilessly reducing them to their banalities.

Was this haphazard socialising a sign of sickness in the head, something deeper than the affliction in London that sent them scurrying across the Continent to run up more debts? Had he in despair given up distinguishing? Was that what Bianca – if she existed – meant?

She couldn't judge: she had such slender experience of him in a commonplace world.

Unusually, they were walking together when they met the Bigg-Staithes. The man was a jowly English squire from Hampshire with a florid face: he seemed always about to deliver a joke he couldn't remember. His pretty diminutive wife assumed she and Robert an ordinary couple. She tried to talk to Ann.

Venetian fashions so strange. The masquerade costume she'd worn at carnival with a pink sequinned mask, imagine! Moving her little hands in coquettish gestures and scratching the air with puce gloved fingers, she explained rounded sleeves and gathered bodices. Then she registered Ann's dowdy clothes, felt her apathy, and abandoned the talk with a little giggle.

She was charmed by Robert. He was all movement and all for her.

To these nondescript tourists, he made remarks on England's sorry state as if they were thinking beings. Ann was embarrassed for him. One side or other must in the end be disabused.

The theatre was proposed. Robert spluttered. The London theatre dealt in vapid stuff, performed by crude actors answering money-grubbing managers. He was hasty and dogmatical, not brilliant at all. What had happened to him?

Bigg-Staithe was impressed and determined to remember the opinion. ‘But here,' he said, ‘here the very town is theatrical.' He'd been told this many times by his expensive guide Altonello. Surely the theatre in Venice could not so heartily offend a man of such taste as Mr James.

‘We do need amusement,' said his wife, stroking Robert with her eyes. Lightly she placed her gloved, beringed little fingers on his arm, then put both hands together in front of her face in a pretty gesture of prayer.

‘Yes,' agreed her husband eagerly. ‘We will go to the Teatro San Luca. Our guide told us we must go there.'

Why did Ann not leave then and go home? Women could always summon a headache. Was there jealousy, some impulse of fear she might lose Robert to this frivolous doll? Surely not. Losing would be release. In any case no one else would take him on – or would they? She reddened, recollecting ‘Bianca'.

It was an
opera seria
for the benefit of a prima donna they'd never heard of. Altonello, paid handsomely for his advice from both clients and theatres, declared she was the rage in Venice and Vienna and was kept in magnificence by a rich and concupiscent signore from Milan. She was singing part of Rossini's
Otello
with its happy ending. Robert snorted. Othello, another great man whom Venice destroyed.

The diva sang in a silvery voice that travelled out into the night and rolled over the waters before returning to the ear. Despite her dislike of the story, Ann was enchanted. Robert expressed ennui by smoking and squirming. All technique, artifice, nothing, no heart, no art.

‘She sang very well,' said Ann as Mrs Bigg-Staithe tittered and fluttered her fan of black sequins and white feathers.

‘A child with a good voice. Nothing more. You do not go to the place where she sings. You are on earth all the time.'

‘Perhaps you are not a devotee of music, Mr James,' ventured Mr Bigg-Staithe, eager to know what Robert thought of everything, to learn what he himself should think. Opera was a painful penance: he would like licence to say so.

Robert shrugged. ‘I love music, Mr Bigg-Staithe. It's the highest art; it comes straight from the mind. I once journeyed many miles to hear Beethoven, the Napoleon of notes.'

Mr Bigg-Staithe looked surprised – it was odd to invoke the little Frenchman in such a manner.

Ann said, ‘Venice doesn't suit Beethoven's music. Here they like the
buffo
as if they know they can't scale the height. But they do that very well.'

Robert looked at her with an expression Mrs Bigg-Staithe never saw. ‘Oh yes,' he said, ‘they must make a joke of what they can't achieve.'

Was he speaking of himself, he looked so despairing? He made no jokes now.

Where were the images that buoyed him up, his creations? In the past he'd said that it was not images, not even words alone, that mattered in themselves, but the emotion that allowed them to surge
forward in the right order. If that emotion were disturbed, then all was disturbed. If there were no transformation through words, what then? What if now for the first time he felt his life invaded by his body? If he did, he would reject the idea. He would never be vulnerable.

As they separated they turned into couples by force of habit. In the light from braziers by the water, Ann saw the Bigg-Staithes in their fine warm clothes arm-in-arm, a gorgeous vibrant double beast in the chill spring air. She and Robert stood apart, quite different animals.

‘Venice is suffocating,' he said suddenly when they were both awake and exhausted in the night, he because he woke himself from deep sleep too often and she because she couldn't sleep when he did; the spurts and groaning of his breathing had become worse these last weeks.

Though it was cold she had to get up. She sat on the edge of the bed, a thick old shawl round her shoulders.

Robert grunted and rolled over on his side. ‘Genius is destroyed by littleness.' He swung his legs on to the floor, throwing aside the heavy coverlet. He sat up unsteadily. ‘Littleness, Madam,' he shouted.

Despite Giancarlo Scrittori's best efforts, it was not easy always to avoid unwelcome encounters, unless one kept to the vegetable patches of La Giudecca or the high-sided
campi
of the ghetto. So now, near the Accademia gallery where a barge sold dried and stored fruit from the Veneto and a
traghetto
waited to ferry people across the Grand Canal, Ann, Robert James, the Bigg-Staithes with their guide Altonello and Giancarlo Scrittori all met by unhappy chance.

There were introductions but the Bigg-Staithes showed little interest in an Italian neither rich nor patrician; Giancarlo Scrittori was polite, Robert sour.

Mr Bigg-Staithe took his lead from his new friend. He grumbled about the difficulty of being paddled everywhere and the ugliness of so much of the decrepit town.

They had been to the Gesuati church, directed there by their guide. He'd proposed they should see this fairly new, sumptuous building mainly because he intended afterwards to lead them to his friend's
taverna
on the Grand Canal.

The Bigg-Staithes were dismayed; no picturesque nuns or monks tramped the aisles. The order had been suppressed and the place turned into a parish church, the monastery a boys' home. Mr Bigg-Staithe left some coins – Altonello made sure of this – and hastened out, his wife on his arm.