Stone Virgin (43 page)

‘Of course I remember. It was on that day I first knew I was –’

‘But you
are
eternal, you said. I saw myself in your eyes and I was pleased because I am a fool too, but then I thought,
cosa vuol dire questo Signore?
What does he mean? I meant only that I want to live, I want to be alive for ever, but you meant the Eternal Feminine or some such rubbish.
Non fare il cretino
, Simon, there is no such thing. Now, because I have failed to be the Madonna, you want to turn me into Jezebel, you want to be the Hercules Poirot of Venice and prove everything with the aid of a cufflink.’

She paused for a moment, then said, with an extraordinary, driven vehemence, ‘I am
myself
, not your distortions. I
enjoyed
deceiving Litsov. Money, other men sometimes. What other way was there? It was
action
. Stuck there on the island to assist his talent, cook and clean for him, strip to be his model, stand or sit or lie while he cut me up into fragments, was that enough? It was enough for
him
. All his sex went into those bits of metal.’

‘Did you and Lattimer sleep together?’ The question, so long in his mind, sprang from him now without premeditation, forced out by her admissions.

‘It is not really your business,’ she said, ‘but no, we didn’t. I need to be strongly attracted before I can do that.’

Raikes struggled to suppress the pleasure these few, almost careless words of hers had given him. He said, ‘You could have left him, couldn’t you? But of course you might have found yourself pushed for money. Well, you are rich now, you have it all.’

‘Simon,’ she said with a sudden change of tone, ‘don’t let us stand here arguing any more. I never intended Litsov’s death, but he is dead. We – you and I – we are alive still. If you are a man you will look at me and see me and take me as I am.’

She had noted his pleasure, he realized, the shameful gratification he had somehow not managed to conceal. She was formidable, he knew it now, as delicate in perception as she was quick in mind; and intent, focused to register his weakness. He cast about in his mind for an answer.

‘That night in the hotel,’ she said, ‘it has never been so good with anyone else, that is the truth, I promise you.’

‘If I am a man?’ he said slowly. ‘You talk as if you had the only notion of what a man is. You are doing the same thing you accused me of.’

‘Why do you talk as if we were in a courtroom? Listen to me, you could sculpt again. It was the great disappointment of your life, you said so. Now you have the choice to make again. You could give up your work at the museum. I could help you.’

‘Help me?’ He looked at her almost incredulously, ‘I should have thought you’d had just about enough of helping sculptors,’ he said. The colour was back in her face now and her eyes were bright. She was serious, he was suddenly convinced of it – it was monstrous, but she was entirely serious: she wanted to take him on, make a sculptor of him. The offer was naive, perverse, delinquent, all at the same time. He looked closely at her face, the delicate bones at cheek and temple, the green-tawny eyes, the wide, sensuous mouth, lips slightly parted in the eagerness of her feelings. He struggled to imagine what her motives might be, and failed. In this moment of uncertainty, he experienced a sudden strong impulse of sexual desire for her. He looked away quickly, in case his eyes betrayed him.

‘I need to
believe
,’ he said. ‘I need completeness, somehow. I don’t know how to explain it. People call me a perfectionist but that’s not it really. I think it’s partly why I turned away from being a sculptor. I think now I was wrong to turn away. That’s why I wanted the past so much, you know, the complete past of the Madonna. But all I have got is fragments. With you too it’s the same. I don’t understand you. I have looked too hard and I have somehow convicted myself. I don’t know if you can see what I mean. I have corrupted my own feelings about you and about her.’

‘Because of a cufflink?’ she said.

He was silent for a moment or two. Then he said, ‘Because you left him there.’

She had moved closer to the Madonna. For a few moments he saw the two faces together, the vivid flesh and the immaculate stone. Then, with that devastating ability to sense what he might be feeling, she said: ‘The man who made this was different from you, Simon Raikes. He had courage to finish something.’

He remained silent. She waited a moment longer, then turned away and began to climb down the ladder. He made no move to stop her. When she had gone he stood motionless there for several minutes, feeling alone and bereft. In this stricken silence he became aware gradually of the presence and predicament of the Madonna, the mute demand of the vulnerable stone. He would work, he would concentrate, he would shut his mind to everything else.

He had everything he needed, the wax acrylic, the propane burner – these had been in readiness from the beginning. He set to work with devotion, beginning as before with the hem of her gown, using a narrow, house-painter’s brush to apply the preservative, determined to neglect no smallest part of her – anything missed the air would swoop on, deposit its contaminants there, set up once again the process of decay.

He worked unremittingly, the turpentine smell of the preservative in his nostrils, using the brush sometimes, sometimes his hands, working the glutinous stuff into the pores of the stone, stroking it into the complex folds of her clothing. As he settled into the caressive rhythm of the work, he found himself despite all resolutions thinking intently about Chiara again, going over the details of their interview. It seemed to him now that he had taken the wrong attitude towards her; he had assumed the air of a superior being. No wonder she had been angry … Her first anger had not been for him, however, but for Lattimer, anger and contempt – a proof she had not known of that despoiling of the dead? Yes. No reason to think she knew Lattimer would kill him, or even do him physical harm, though she must have had some idea of it, of the possibility of it, otherwise why go to such trouble to establish an alibi? Or was he attributing too much calculation to her? She had panicked, phoned Lattimer, kept away. It was all he could with any certainty accuse her of … She had not had a look of panic, however. He strove to recall her demeanour of that evening. Tense, stimulated somehow. His great mistake, he saw it now, had been to adopt that accusing attitude, give her no real chance to explain. She was cheating Litsov, she admitted that. Still, the way she put it … Energy like hers, pent up and frustrated, might well find an outlet in such a way. Could she really be blamed for it?
All his sex went into those bits of metal
. He remembered her, on the day of his first visit, standing somehow lost among those fragments of herself. And Lattimer, with his trophy-tufts. Hers not among them.
She did not sleep with Lattimer
. For some reason he believed this implicitly. She slept with
me
. I have been too harsh with her, he thought.

All the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, as he worked on the statue these thoughts continued to revolve in his mind. He felt no hunger. There was still the slight heaviness in his limbs, but his hands obeyed him well. He had reached her face now. With brush and fingertip he coated cheeks and brow, smoothed the wax into her eye-sockets, nostrils, the indentations of her hair, the faint curve of the mouth.

Last of all came the burning. When he was sure, as far as humanly possible, that no part of the Madonna had been left untreated, he played the flame of the burner over her, sealing the whole surface with brief but intense blasts of heat, welding the wax on to the stone to form an unbroken film.

In the late afternoon he stepped back from her, his eyes stinging. She was impregnable, impervious, proof against corruption – for how long, he wondered, fifty years, a hundred? My lifetime at least, he thought. She stood there now as he had envisaged her on his arrival, as he had aspired to re-create her, resplendent in the warm pallor of her stone, her body in tension between reluctance and desire, her dreaming face turned away, that arm held out, guarding.

She was finished, his work was done. He would make his report, the work would be inspected, the scaffolding taken down. Then he would see her as men had been intended to see her, from ground level, thirty feet below. I have been looking from too close, he thought. I have distorted things. No more visions … From the moment of swallowing the first thirty milligrams he had accepted the doctor’s view, he saw now, agreed that there was a lesion in his brain, undetectable but beyond question there, resulting in neural discharge in the form of hallucinations. Perhaps the sense of evil was merely a neural discharge too, that sickening sense of mystery that had come to him the evening before, as he watched the light fade on the water, fingered the trivial, inconclusive object of silver and stone. Yes, he had been looking from too close. I must try again, he thought, I must see her again.

He looked up at the slightly averted face of the Madonna. Something more was needed, some offering, placatory, sacrificial.
Of course
. He crouched down, groping and peering among the draperies of her robe, behind, where the moulding was a little cruder. Finding an incision deep and narrow enough he took the cufflink from his trouser pocket and inserted it edgeways, pressing down until it was wedged firm, with no part projecting. With his fingers he smeared wax into the crack until it was level. Then he whisked the flame of the burner over, sealing it in.

The Burano–Torcello boat came in as he was descending at the Fondamenta Nuove. Within a few minutes they were heading north, the white walls of the
cimitero
receding on the left, the shimmering, depthless expanse of the Lagoon opening before them.

He had planned, on arriving at Burano, to find someone with a
sandalo
who would be willing to take him at once to the house on the island. However, standing on the little quay, distracted by shifting reflections of houses and boats in the harbour water, he experienced a sudden loss of nerve. He needed a drink first. He walked away from the harbour past stalls hung with lace, found a small café on the corner of the square and despite the heat asked for cognac. He was half-way through this when he realized he was in the same café he and Chiara had gone to, where they had had the drink together, when she had said she was returning with him to Venice. Because of the fog, because it was too dangerous … She had made the phone call from here.

The realization, combining with his nervousness, was suddenly too much for him. Again in that oddly automatic manner his hand went to the small cylinder in his jacket pocket. He had intended to take the second half of his dose, if he took any more at all, late that evening before going to bed. Now, however, rapidly and surreptitiously, using the rest of the brandy to help him, he swallowed down a further thirty milligrams.

Making his way back to the quay, negotiating for a boat, he felt no immediate change. He found a man willing to take him and within minutes they were on the way, heading out into the bright waste of the Lagoon. The sun was high now, the day was cloudless, windless. Here and there small groups of gulls floated, looking less like birds than bright buoyant crystals precipitated on the surface by the action of the light.

The boatman stood at the prow, lunging forward with his single oar. He made no attempt at conversation and Raikes was glad of this, glad to let the silence of the Lagoon settle round him. The sun was hot on his face. He narrowed his eyes in an attempt to make out the distant shapes of land; but it was too much of an effort and after a while he desisted, content to watch the water cleaving with their passage, listen to the creak and splash of the oar. A certain torpor was beginning to descend on him; the feeling of heaviness had intensified and he had again become aware of his thick, unagile tongue. It occurred to him that he had been unwise to mix brandy with the barbiturate. He had not eaten much either, he suddenly remembered; in fact he had eaten nothing at all since the day before, with Steadman, at Florian’s. What had Steadman said? Their conversation was remote now, as if it had taken place in some other phase of life altogether. He had spoken of the Madonna cult, yes. The few known facts about Girolamo’s life. The Supplicanti, still nursing their heresy after two hundred years, devising strange sins for the sake of heaven. Contempt for the flesh can take various forms. Among them, murder. Girolamo – could he really have choked the life from the woman who had given him his Madonna?

The Litsovs’ boat was in its accustomed place. The tide was up, water brimmed against the supports of the jetty, covered the seaweed, concealed the algae-line on the shore rocks. He paid the man, thought briefly of asking him to wait, decided against it. He began to climb the steps up from the landing stage.

As he reached the path at the top and began to walk along it, the same familiarity descended on him as before, the sense of passing through stages of intensely significant experience. This had become a landscape of his own shaping, charged with his love, silt and sand and stones of it; clay colour of the path, caked now with heat; detritus of past tides in the nondescript shrub; constant glimmering presence of the water.

He passed the place where he and Wiseman had come upon her gardening, turned the bend in the path, approached the house in its cluster of pine and willow. The nervousness was there still, blunted now by his lassitude and a certain sense of slowness in the movements of his eyes.

No one came in answer to his knocking. He tried the door, found it unlocked and stepped inside, calling her name as once, on a misty morning, she had called Litsov’s. He began to walk down the passage, looking into rooms, calling several times again, experiencing as he did so the vague beginnings of panic.

She was nowhere to be seen. Silence resettled heavily in the intervals between his calls. He passed through the kitchen on to the path at the rear of the house. This led through a grove of listing, etiolated willows to Litsov’s studio. Beyond, the gleaming Lagoon again became visible, absolutely motionless, unbroken to the horizon. His fear grew. There was the boat, the unlocked door – she must be on the island somewhere. She had offered herself and he had rejected her. A woman scorned. And Litsov’s death still in her mind … He remembered the quiver in her voice when she spoke about courage. What had she said?
The courage to finish something
. He had not answered her, barely looked at her, made no attempt to stop her leaving. It was here, between the trees and the shore, that they had searched for Litsov that day, calling this way and that, rooting about in hollows, in the tangle of shrubs, the overgrown rubble of old houses. But it was in the water they had found him …