Stone Virgin (6 page)

Good God, Raikes muttered to himself when she had gone. What on earth is the matter with me? He felt feverish. This grandmother with the little white apron. Was it some association with apple pie? He tried to retrace his mental steps. The apron had reminded him fleetingly of a girdle. Mary’s, that she had loosened and thrown off, on her Assumption?

In the stress of these thoughts he moved again, sharply, and caught sight of his own head and shoulders lurking in the dark shine of the window beyond the table lamp. Light from this threw a pattern of broken loops and ovals over his reflection, like loose metallic ropes. Above these encumbrances he could make out his cheeks and nose and high, austere forehead; but his eyes were lost in shadow and the lower part of his face was gagged with light.

For some moments Raikes regarded with distinct unease this masked, fettered, curiously watchful acquaintance. Then he looked back towards his diary but there seemed nothing for the moment to add. However, he had omitted the date and he entered it now at the top of the page:
March 20th, 1972
.

2

IT HAPPENED ON
the third and final day of the spraying; though Raikes did not think of it as an event exactly, anyway not at first: rather as a protracted quiver of the optic nerves, strained after so much peering. That there were elements in it that could not be explained in this way he hardly realized at the time.

He was standing inside his enclosure of plastic sheets – Biagi had been commendably prompt with this – aiming with a half-appalled sense of violation straight into the Madonna’s face, driving minute particles of water at point blank range and high velocity into her eyes and mouth. The water hissed as it issued from the nozzle, broke against her face with a flatter, softer sound and fugitive gleams of light, the two sounds fusing into a steady sibilance of assault. Water ran blurring over the temples and cheeks, brimmed the eye sockets, sowed pearls in the clogged mouth, clung in beads to the fungoid deposits below the chin. She was so wet it seemed the water must come from within her, vomited from the mouth, wept from the slits of eyes, dripping from folds in draperies saturated by long immersion, as if she were newly dredged up, still running with the waters that had drowned her.

Raikes straightened and stood back, closing off the nozzle of the spray. Some of the carbon had come away, there was no doubt about it; when she was dry again it would be easier to see how much. In any case he did not intend to go on with the spraying much longer, just an hour or two after lunch, probably; she had had three days of it, quite long enough. He glanced at his watch. It was gone twelve. Steadman would be waiting for him – they had arranged to meet in the square for a drink before lunch.

He moved close to the Madonna with the intention of leaning the metal tube against the wall alongside her. In fact he was beginning to bend forward to do this. His eyes were on the statue still but he was on the point of looking away to where he was intending to place the spray. His face was very near the folds of the Madonna’s robe, where they gathered at the waist, too near to see any form or human likeness, only the ancient enduring grain of the stone. It was then, at the moment he had relaxed attention, was on the point of looking away, perhaps had already begun to do so, that a sudden sense of being quite in the open, without protection, descended on him, accompanied by a strong sensation of space and silence, and a feeling of threatened balance which made him clutch for the rail. He had a fleeting impression of light but he was not in it, or not quite in it, a long straight shadow across the light, two human bodies, naked and gleaming wet, part in light and part in shadow, standing together, but not very close, and some sort of echo or resonance, perhaps of voices, but no words. The impression was a strangely piercing one, perhaps because of the hush that seemed to surround it, but it was over at once, before his own body had achieved a stiffening of surprise. He found himself holding tightly to the scaffold rail. The wet Madonna was again before him. With conscious care he leaned forward to place the spray against the wall.

It was surprise he felt chiefly, mixed already with a sort of doubt, as he slipped out of his overalls, changed out of his wellingtons for gym shoes – the cubicle formed by the plastic sheets had become changing room and frequently eating place as well as workshop to him – and began to climb down the ladder. His first steps on firm ground were attended by a sense of insecurity, even a remote sort of panic. Then he became aware of people around him, saw pigeons fly up. Steadman was sitting alone at one of the outside tables and Raikes moved across the square towards him, remembering to smile only when he was almost there. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Forgot the time.’

‘You’re a dedicated fellow,’ Steadman said, in his flat laconic tone. ‘What are you having?’

‘Beer, I think.’ Raikes looked across the square. The impulse he had felt to tell Steadman about his experience died quietly. He had sensed something derisive in the other man’s brief words, not unkindly so but sufficiently to put him on the defensive. He had no gift for irony himself, and was highly vulnerable to it, his own nature tending always to enthusiasm. His usual defence was to assume a more distant air, and this sometimes made him seem cold or priggish. He knew Steadman regarded it as odd and excessive that he should have elected to do all the work himself from beginning to end, even these messy and laborious preliminaries, which he could easily have got an assistant to do. Steadman had no sympathy for more extreme natures, which was why sarcasm came so easily to him and why the two had never become very close.

The beer came, and Raikes busied himself pouring out a glass. Of course, he thought, she was wet, running with water. Some association of memory had perhaps been responsible. Common enough, wet bodies, perhaps archetypal. Tired eyes, and some involuntary association. Perhaps he had straightened up too suddenly, just before. That would explain the feeling of vertigo … ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what have you been up to?’

‘Just pottering about,’ Steadman said. ‘I’ve been trying to get some good pictures for my book. It’s bloody amazing how few good photographs there are of Venetian sculptures. I’d like one of her, when she’s all cleaned up.’ He nodded in the direction of the church. ‘Odd creature, she is,’ he added after a moment. ‘Quite untypical.’

‘Typical, untypical,’ Raikes said. ‘That is all art historians seem to think about these days. No one makes value judgements any more.’

‘Safer not to. Preferable anyway.’

‘But why?’ Raikes felt the slight fluttering in his stomach which always preceded direct conflicts of opinion with others. ‘Why?’ he said again. ‘It is a human duty to make distinctions of value, it is one of the things that make us fully human.’

‘I should have thought’, Steadman said, ‘that we had all had enough of being fully human, for the time being. It would be better to simply be sensible instead, and not make so many judgements of any kind.’

‘Just because it’s risky,’ Raikes said excitedly, ‘we should steer clear of it. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Not exactly.’ Steadman seemed about to go on with the argument but checked himself, perhaps misliking Raikes’s combative manner, and after a moment said in different tones, ‘Anyway it’s not true of all of us. Take Sir Hugo Templar, for example. He’ll rattle off value judgements for you nineteen to the dozen. Have you met him?’

‘Not really. He has been to give lectures at the museum.’

‘Pleasure in store,’ Steadman said.

Sir Hugo Templar was the chairman of Rescue Venice, the organization funding the British restoration project. He was also an authority on European Baroque. He was coming from London to preside over a working conference due shortly, combined progress report and pooling of information.

‘I’ll have to be there, I suppose.’ Steadman looked gloomily into his glass. ‘I’m not going back till two days later. Just my bleeding luck.’

‘What did you mean when you said she wasn’t typical?’

‘Your Madonna? Not typical of the Venetian sculpture of the time, I meant. That was still fairly primitive, you know.’

‘Well, of course, I know that. But he could have trained somewhere else, couldn’t he?’

‘I don’t think there was a native Venetian capable of it, at the time. My guess is that he came from the north, Lombardy perhaps. There are Tuscan influences too. It’s not a flamboyant style, it’s a more naturalistic type of Gothic. If you look at the original shape of the block of stone, which you can see from the base, you’ll notice that it had no real effect on the composition of the figure. The knees and feet are more or less aligned with the block but the upper torso cuts across one corner. This is quite untypical of Venetian Gothic. I noticed it at once.’

Launched on his subject, Steadman had forgotten that he was supposed to be a tough guy. His voice had taken on warmth, his tone had quickened, he was looking quite eagerly at Raikes. ‘Her arms, too,’ he said. ‘The right hand is conventional enough, pressed to her breast to show how unworthy she is. And of course the extended left hand is common in Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, but hers is held very low, and
across
the body. It gives a curiously sexual significance to the pose. That might be accidental, of course. Or one might be quite mistaken, simply a perverted modern. The trouble is, we don’t know enough, and we never will now. Artists were constantly on the move, a sculptor of the time might work in half-a-dozen cities in the course of his career, there was a lot of cross-fertilization going on. Most of the work has no documentation. The difficulties of attribution are enormous.’

‘But you think a northern Italian, who had worked in Tuscany?’

‘Not necessarily worked there. It would have been enough for him to come into contact with Tuscan artists, like the Lamberti, or Nanno di Bartolo, who are known to have been in Venice in the 1420s. There was a lot going on here at the time. Foscari was extending the Ducal Palace, an enormous building project. The republic was rich, the pay was good, people came flocking from all over the place.’

‘I wonder where the Gabriel is,’ Raikes said.

‘The messenger boy? Dismembered in some mason’s scrapyard or lurking about in a cloister somewhere. Perhaps he was never made. One thing’s certain though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Whoever the sculptor was, if he really intended that left arm to seem to be guarding the pudenda, which is certainly what it looks like, then it is unique among depictions of the Annunciation, she has a unique left arm.’

Steadman paused, looking across the square. ‘That in itself would be profoundly original,’ he said. ‘Oh God, here come the Stakhanovites.’

The Tintoretto people were trooping diagonally across the square towards them, in loose arrowhead formation, with their leader Barfield at the head. All were wearing navy-blue boiler suits.

‘Those things must be special issue,’ Steadman said. ‘Birmingham City Galleries, boiler suits navy, art restorers for the use of. They’ve had their sandwich in the sacristy, now they’re coming for their coffee.’

There was a certain sourness in his tone. His efforts to detach Miss Greenaway from the tribal unit had not so far met with much success. None of the Tintoretto team was ever seen without the others, they conversed almost entirely among themselves and their days seemed to follow a pattern of ritual observances.

Having reached the café enclosure they seemed to be about to make for a separate table, but Steadman called out a greeting and after slight hesitation they approached and began to commandeer chairs from the tables around. ‘How’s it going?’ Steadman said, when they were all seated.

Miss Greenaway laughed briefly and mirthlessly, as if thereby hung a tale. She seemed, however, flushed, Raikes thought, and he wondered if she was more aware of Steadman’s interest, and more responsive, than her rather bluff and forthright style would indicate.

For a while after this laugh there was silence among the group as if that might be thought sufficient response. Then Barfield, whose title was Scientific Officer, a neat, sallow man with a visionary way of widening his eyes, said, ‘You are not going to believe this.’

‘Try us,’ Steadman said.

‘It has taken us all this time just to get the paintings off the wall, I tell you no lie.’

‘It has been a rush,’ the other assistant said. She was older and grimmer than Miss Greenaway and had a perm and a wedding ring. ‘It has been a race against time,’ she said.

‘My God,’ Steadman compressed his lips and nodded slowly. ‘Racing to get them down,’ he said. ‘Who said the epic is defunct?’

This sarcasm was so crude that Raikes immediately became hot with embarrassment, thinking how much it would wound the Tintoretto people; but to his surprise he saw that they all seemed to be taking the remarks at face value.

‘They started taking up the floor today,’ Owen, the fattish Art Consultant said, his glasses shining. ‘That didn’t help, I can tell you. It did not help, did it, Gerald?’

The waiter, whose name was Angelo, came to take the order, and while this was going on Miss Greenaway, still looking flushed, began to undo the top buttons of her boiler suit. She was wearing a white T-shirt underneath.

‘Taking the floor up, were they?’ Steadman said. ‘My God. So your footing was threatened, was it?’ But his heart wasn’t in it now; he had been distracted by Miss Greenaway’s unbuttoning. Angelo too seemed interested, remaining at their table some time after the order had been given.

‘The workmen are in there now,’ Owen said. ‘The Soprintendenza alle Gallerie are doing it. Italian funds apparently.’

‘They are going to put in a completely new floor,’ Miss Greenaway said. ‘Christ, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ She slipped the upper part of her boiler suit off her shoulders and allowed it to fall over the back of her chair. Beneath the close-fitting T-shirt her breasts were outlined, beautifully large and round.

‘I hope the mains services won’t be affected,’ Raikes said. In the midst of these words, without warning and therefore without possibility of control, an intense and turgid interest in Miss Greenaway’s bosom invaded him – it seemed like an invasion, a quick-shooting spore of lechery, wafted on a resistless breeze from he knew not where, sprouting almost at once into speculation as to whether Miss Greenaway was wearing a bra and into the attendant impulse to slip a hand under the T-shirt to ascertain the matter. As before with his landlady it was not the thought so much that bothered him – such thoughts come and go – but the feverish intensity of it. Blood fluxed in his loins. He felt himself distending. He said desperately, ‘We shall need good pressure for the spraying.’