A Man of Genius (14 page)

‘So disappointing,' he remarked.

‘A copy of Redentore,' said Robert, ‘and that's a barren treat. The church is nothing here. If the French had stayed, there might've been some compensation for the loss.'

‘But the Tiepolo on the ceiling,' said Giancarlo Scrittori, ‘is – '

Mr Bigg-Staithe interrupted, ‘Venice is nothing,' he said and looked for encouragement from Robert. ‘Well, nothing since the Austrians.'

Ann glanced at her friend. He was silent but gave a little bow.

When the party began to move on, she remained behind with Giancarlo Scrittori, ostensibly to discuss something about their common friends in Palazzo Savelli. Altonello pricked up his ears at the name but it was too late and the group dissolved.

For the first time she saw her friend openly disturbed. The mildness usually in his eyes was gone.

‘It is so easy, so facile, to say these things. Why are they, so many people from your country and others, here? Why? How do we have so much opera, whether they enjoy or not, so much art, and yes such comfort and prosperity, for we are not so poor before or after the Austrians? Is it only something good to be making wars and killing people for cities you don't need – is that what being something in the world is? If we do not patrol land and seas and order people to pay to pass, are we less for it?'

Before she could reply soothingly, he'd regained his affability. ‘After all,' he said, ‘the Austrians returned the bronze horses, a little battered but that was not their fault.'

She glanced at him quizzically.

‘I know I have told you this already but it is a fact that always brings me back to myself.'

They walked a little in silence back towards San Trovaso. Then Ann spoke, ‘My husband,' she paused, it was never easy to use the term, ‘meant I am sure no disrespect to Venice. He really knows little of its politics. He is so used to denigrating rulers and authority of any sort. It is his own country he despises. I cannot answer for the others.'

Giancarlo Scrittori smiled urbanely. ‘Then he should not meddle.'

Ann supposed the word misused; perhaps he meant ‘judge'.

‘Yes, a man may laugh at his own. England is perhaps not now so easy to mock, though. It is rich and triumphant.'

‘I don't think everyone in England feels triumphant or rich. You will have heard of soldiers killing starving people at St Peter's Field last year.' She paused. ‘And, after all, he is not English.'

Giancarlo looked puzzled, but did not enquire. He'd not quite taken mental leave of the vexed subject. He remembered the dinner at Palazzo Savelli and remarks young Beatrice had later made to him of this irksome man disturbing her brother with what neither understood.

‘He is wrong about Venetians being dominated by the church till liberated by the French. Always we were independent of popes, even when we made them. Mohammedans, Jews, Armenians, Orthodox, Protestants, all have worshipped here without hinder. No heretic was burnt. Can you say this for your country?'

‘I say nothing. You have no need to argue with me.'

‘I am so sorry, Signora, but I become defending.'

‘But not angry?'

‘No, never angry with a lady.'

Yet she too wanted to protest. She hoped she could rely on her friend's restored amiability. ‘For women it was not so good a place. Convents where you locked away your nubile girls to save a family fortune.'

Such relief to argue without fearing an explosion! She hoped she'd not gone too far.

‘Ah, Signora, you have some right there but not all.' He looked intently at her. ‘An unhappy marriage can simply be annulled. Your sad Caroline and cruel George would not have their trouble here. That is why you entertain us with your divorce.'

Again she was seeing another side of Giancarlo. He'd seemed so simple, so refreshingly superficial. She sighed: did she never understand anyone?

‘I will leave you here,' he said. ‘I live back near San Barnaba.' She gave him an enquiring look. ‘You have perhaps heard? No? Well, no matter. I have no wife or family with me. And many men like me live in San Barnaba. But I am not what they used to call one of the
barnabotti
, the poor noblemen unmarried and too poor to take much interest in affairs of state. I, as you see, earn my living. I am not of the favoured families like my cousins. I am no indiscriminate supporter of my city, indeed there is much wrong with it. But I do not like it traduced in ignorance.'

‘That is the very point. That is why you need take no offence. It is done in ignorance.'

‘What I say is that, yes, we were in decline in the political world but we were moving with the times, we did not accept the old ways as we used to, there was much hot argument here. We were ready in mind if not in bodies for the French.'

‘And the Austrians?'

He gave her another serious look. ‘As I say, they are here and they bring order. You have heard of the secret Carbonari? No, well, they try to make much trouble. Only the powerless will be hurt if they do. I think your husband knows.'

He broke into a smile, relaxing as if the anxious thoughts had simply swum away on an outgoing breath.

Ann smiled too. She knew that, whatever the Carbonari might be – something like the Masons she supposed – there was no
cara Bianca.

When they parted, she'd no desire to return to La Giudecca. She had things to buy at the Rialto and towards the opera house of La Fenice. She was unknown there and would not be pressed to pay her bills.

As she walked beside the great mass of the Frari church, an impulse, an urge for more delay, took her in. Giancarlo Scrittori had carried her to see Titian's
Assumption
in the Accademia di Belle Arti where it was placed in a poor light: a fitting response to its smoke-damaged and dirty surface. Its move there from the Frari had been on the orders of Napoleon, who intended later to transport it to Paris with his other spoils. Unlike the bronze horses it had not left the city. But nor had it returned to its home. As she sat looking towards where the great altarpiece should have been she let her eyes unfocus while she thought of the absent picture's fiery soul: such longing expressed in the watchers of the miracle.

Robert had said – only once, for it contradicted everything else he professed – there was disproportion, a chasm between what we desire, what we must express, and the world we see and what we can express. Into that chasm we will fall and be swallowed up. No one can step over it.

18

R
obert was ebullient and rather drunk. He held a bottle under one arm.

‘Signor Balbi met a man who's intimate with that poseur Byron. He says no word of him except that he is fat.' Robert laughed. ‘Fat, fat. Oh wonders! So vulgar a lord, so lordly a vulgarian.'

She laughed.

‘Like his cobbler's verse.'

Robert let out a loud
Ave Maria
in the fine baritone voice Ann had not heard since long before they left England. ‘Signor Balbi is the better man. He travels. And not to ravish every female he finds.'

He rooted in the big canvas bag he now carried everywhere. It gave him the look of a haggard painter or ill-fed artisan, the tools of his craft over his shoulder. ‘Tonight I'm going to show that slovenly wench downstairs how to cook. I've been to the Rialto and bought us two quails and a chocolate bon-bon for little Rosa.'

With what? she wondered. God in heaven, with what?

Before the quails, he'd persuaded Signora Scorzeri to cook her speciality, a pasta with a sauce of onions, pine nuts, anchovies and raisins, all in wine. It was cheap and tasty. Robert had seen its potential, and demanded of course more wine, more anchovies, more of everything piquant within it. He never stinted. How had he made her do all this when they must owe so much? Had he given her something substantial at last? If so, where did the money come from? His initial funds must have been exhausted long since. Or was it his admiring of little Rosa? Or just his ‘charm'?

‘Light candles,' he said in excitement, though it was not dark. ‘Lots of candles.' He was like a terrier, all his body, his paunch and hairy chest and bald head wriggling with excitement. Had he a tail, it would have wagged. The thinness showed, the flesh nowhere taut.

It all tasted good, all excellent, the pasta neither too dry nor too wet, the meat firm, sauce just spicy enough. As he had insisted.

He fussed over everything, making sure she had the right amount of liquid with the quail, that the vegetables were firm enough, that there was wine in better glasses than usual. He must have talked the
padrona
into lending them these special vessels for the evening.

The meal had taken so long to prepare and to adjust to his liking that it was late when they finished. Ann was tired. Robert went on drinking. She couldn't and wouldn't keep up. She wished – and not for the first time – that Richard Perry or big Frederick Curran, even John Taylor or John Humphries, were by to keep him company and take from her the weight she'd once so desired to shoulder alone. He needed men around him.

‘My lesson is quite early tomorrow; Beatrice has a fitting for a new gown, so I will have to go to bed soon,' she ventured.

She saw him deflate.

‘Ah, your work,' he sighed. ‘Woman's work.'

‘Well, it's not really my work as you know. I've not done much of that,' she began.

‘No,' he interrupted, ‘you cannot write here, is that it?' He flung out an arm with the glass a quarter full at a precarious angle. It was hard to keep her eyes off it. ‘And I, do I have work?'

‘Of course you do.'

‘My writing is different from yours? You cannot do yours but I should do mine?' The hand came back and he emptied the glass.

‘I didn't mean that. I don't set any store by it, you know I don't.'

‘But it happens whether or not you set store, doesn't it,' he said with that ominous mildness she knew so well.

‘It happens with you, Robert, sometimes, and that is what matters.'

‘Does it?' he said bitterly. ‘Does it?'

She was touching him, he thought, intentionally provoking him, playing him.

She felt the quick fear and, to her shame, the dreadful elation.

His anger was mounting as speedily as his good humour subsided. As always, she felt terrified yet privileged to be involved in this supreme rage as it rose.

Looking from outside even as she cowed before the coming storm, she wondered if she believed in this idea of special talent or genius, and of genius justifying everything. Were they all caught in a bogus faith which demanded other people's suffering?

‘This stinking sewer,' Robert exclaimed, pushing away his chair, ‘I have to get out. Out! Always with you it is not enough. I get you wonderful food and you, you . . .'

‘I said only that I had to work.'

‘Work, work.' He turned round to her. She backed away into the darker corner. ‘You set up for insipidity, mediocrity and then whine. It's pathetic. Look at you wincing. You do that cowering so well. I am assaulted by your fear.'

She pulled herself together and came forward. She could have retreated. She knew that. ‘You wanted to come to Venice. You said you couldn't write in England, it stifled you. Its hypocrisy and complacency.'

‘Don't parrot my words.'

‘I'm not, I agreed with you. But remember we could have gone to France or Ireland, anywhere, if this place wasn't right.'

‘You know I have no wish to see Ireland again.'

‘Even County Cork?'

‘No, not ever.'

Yet she felt him relax just a little at the name. She remarked gently, ‘I can hear that touch of Irish in your voice even now.'

He still looked cross but the face was settling. She had used this trick before. Would he resent it this time?

‘I speak as I speak,' he said, ‘I am from nowhere now, I speak all the places I have been and none.'

‘Well, there are traces.'

She had moved back towards the table and the spindly cold bones of the meal. She forced a smile.

‘Perhaps,' he said, tired. Then he brightened. She was putting together the plates in a homely, self-aware, feminine way. Did he like that?

‘I do sometimes think of it, especially in this bog of a place. The soft sweeping fields, waves breaking not limping on the shore like here, and – ' he looked at the debris of the good meal, ‘potatoes.'

She went on stacking and tidying the plates to take them downstairs in the morning. It was too late now. So the room would smell of food through the night.

‘Let's go to bed,' she said. His anger was gone but so was his exhilaration.

Yet, before they started to undress, as he stood by the window and she by the table, before she could at all prepare herself, something happened, an impulse and surge of emotion darting through the room. She must protest.

‘Don't try to muzzle me.'

There it was, the
so
favoured word. As he snapped, he revealed his yellowing teeth and a little froth emerged at the edge of his mouth. How could he so repeat himself?

She went over to him and held on to him, trying to catch his eyes.

‘Let me go,' he said. ‘I hate those dumb pleading spaniel eyes of yours. I've seen them before. Are you a dog?'

She held on tightly. ‘Let go,' he said again.

She would not.

Then he pulled back his left arm and punched her hard in the face. She let go then.

Her eyeball sank in her head. She fell back – to the ground, only a little involuntarily. She lay still.

Then he kicked her hard in the ribs twice and went out, slamming the door. ‘You damned woman,' he shouted.

It was the third – or was it the fourth? – time this had happened. No, it was the fifth. She had been over the events so often that times had merged.

After an interval she asked herself why she was lying there on the floor. A rib might be cracked, but might not, and she would have to get up at some point. Why not now? Tears welled up of course. Ugly tears.

Why had she not been prepared for violence? The community in Fen Ditton had thought every day of death so that they'd be ready when it came. Why didn't women think every day of what they would suffer just as surely? William Bates would have been better telling her to meditate on this rather than praying for her. And she – why had his training not taught her to be more scrupulous in examining herself? How had she become so mesmerised by abjection? Was it to be as far away as possible from Caroline with her easy, selfish life? Was it to refuse that one final warning: that men could do more than you ever imagined?

As for Robert, he was still raging as he stamped on the last step on his way downstairs and out. Provocation was just as brutal in effect as anything an arm or leg could do. He almost wished he'd kicked her to death, or at least kicked much harder and in that face to silence it. What right had this woman, any woman, to invade him, to think she could control him, hold, cling to him? He had given up a lot for her. It was always a mistake. It was not the first time he'd made it. He had come back over and over again when he ought to have stayed away. He knew that now.

He walked much of the night. The sunrise made his eyes water. He felt himself in its blaze, his promise fading as this beauty burgeoned. Was hope lost? I will begin writing again tomorrow, he told himself. I will cull poetry out of this accursed prosaic life.

Beatrice was waiting for Ann, who was just a little later than usual. ‘I have to go to the dressmaker's,' she began. Then she saw Ann's face and her wincing walk. ‘Madonna! You are injured, Signora?' she said with alarm.

‘No, it's nothing. I fell down the stairs.'

Beatrice gave her a quick, pained look.

‘Truly,' said Ann, ‘it's very dark on the steps in our lodgings, slippery and easy to fall.'

‘Didn't your husband steady you?'

Ann reddened, the colour mixing with the bruises. Beatrice turned away; it was a tact born of years round Francesco Savelli. ‘But if you feel well enough we will have our lesson. My cousin Giancarlo is very keen I learn from you. He says you have much pure language.'

‘That's an odd thing to say.' Ann would have accompanied her words with a smile if it hadn't hurt. ‘He has been most kind in introducing me to you.'

When she returned to La Giudecca and mounted the dark stairs she avoided seeing Signora Scorzeri, often out with her beloved Rosa. That so far was the only good thing about the incident, its possible secrecy. The jolly Frenchmen had gone from the apartment below on a tour of Tuscany, and no other lodgers had taken the rooms while they were away.

How much had the
padrona
heard last night? She would have recognised raised voices in any language, and the tumble, even perhaps the heavy foot. Especially after her good dinner. If she had, would she not have come out to stare at the result this morning?

They were both subdued and said little. She hoped Robert was ashamed but doubted it. How could he be? It was against his nature. He was still angry.

‘I never liked it,' he said suddenly. ‘I never wanted to be here.'

‘Well, we are. And you sometimes think it beautiful.'

‘Beautiful like a dead woman. A dead woman who deserved to be dead.'

‘You talk in clichés now.'

‘I've caught the habit.'

Let it pass, she cautioned herself. ‘Why are you so rude?'

‘Don't start.'

For once she didn't ‘start' but simply left the room, hastily pulling on a warm cloak. She must go out, however chill the weather. He said nothing of her bruised face.

She looked out at the small side canal, then walked holding her aching ribs with one arm towards the great lagoon at the end. It stretched to the sandbanks of the Lido, the islands, the low-flying birds, the fishermen's stakes, the
briccole
, the quiet boats far out. She'd come in the months to love its desolation, its mixture of nothingness and excess, its tame wildness, with sea and sky like the beginning of creation, yet nowhere more lived on and in, more touched by men, nowhere more created and uncreated.

John Taylor might have caught it as he'd caught the low East Anglian coast and sky, with his light blue- and green-washed colours. Yet she couldn't imagine him in Venice.

She retraced her steps and came out on the other side looking towards the city. She took a
traghetto
over to San Marco, then walked towards the Rialto. The walking hurt but the air through the muslin over her blackened eye was comforting. Normally she went there to find the cheapest fish for Signora Scorzeri to cook when it was the weekend and the tetchy
padrona
refused to do the shopping. But it was far too late for that now. Today she went just for the going.

She paused on a bridge and looked down at the murky water of a narrow canal. Another woman stopped momentarily, then a man brushed past her, stood for a while close by, then moved on. She didn't look up. What had she to do with any other beings?

‘I'm glad I had no child,' he said that evening as he pushed away the dry baked fish.

It was as near to an apology as he could get. He didn't look at her. He'd responded to her bruised face as if to an insult.

‘I could have tormented it as I'm tormenting myself.'

And me, she thought. And Me.

As she lay on the bed alone – Robert had gone somewhere, it didn't matter where – she was overwhelmed by a rush of humiliation, a deep
physical
shame. How could she be like this and not act?

But what act was enough? What was in any way equal to her massive passivity?

In all her imaginings she'd never invented anything so morbid, so hopeless for her helpless heroines. They always triumphed by sheer goodness – and beauty. Only the bad, the vicious, those provoked beyond decent endurance, had to act.

Yet what act was available for the weak, however vicious they'd become? Not for them the great fist, the iron-hard foot, the sword, even the pistol with its single shot. No rousing combat, exhilarating strife so beloved by men, or why glorify the simple-minded Napoleon?

If you cannot hit and fight in the open, you have to work furtively.

Her bruised mind dwelt on the crime of vulnerability. How ever to make amends? A furtive killing perhaps.

A soothing fantasy. But how did one actually use a stiletto? Surely it could be pressed in wrongly, slither into a flabby inessential part or scrape the bone and miss the heart? Besides, she never knew when he dozed or woke except when inebriated and snoring. And then the breath was punctuated with rumblings and flutings so loud he was always on the point of waking himself.