There are certain moments in life when—
But no, no. We shall dispense with the disquisition on fate and the forked paths that destiny sets us upon and all such claptrap. There are no moments, only the seamless drift; how many times do I have to tell myself this simple truth? That day I could no more have prevented myself from stepping through that doorway than I could have made my heart stop beating or the lymph halt in its courses through my glands. I do not mean to imply there was coercion involved, that, fixed in Francie’s amused, measuring gaze, I had been robbed of all volition; if it were so, how much easier everything would seem. No, what I mean simply is that I did not stop, did not turn aside, but went on, and so closed off all other possibilities. Things happen, therefore they have happened. If there are other worlds in which the alternatives to our actions are played out we may know nothing of them. Even if I had felt a spider’s web of foreboding brush against my face I would have been drawn irresistibly through it by the force of that linked series of tiny events that began the instant I was born, if not before, and that would bundle me however unceremoniously through today’s confrontation, just as it will propel me on to others more or less fateful than that one until at last I arrive at the last of all and disappear forever into the suddenly shattered mirror of my self. It is what I call my life. It is what I imagine I lead, when all the time it is leading me, like an ox to the shambles.
The corridor in which I found myself was low and broad and cluttered with stuff. White walls again, the peculiar, tired, parched yellowish-white that was the overall no-colour of the interior of the house. Of the same shade and texture, at least in my first vague awareness of them, were the nameless things piled everywhere, the litter of decades – of centuries – resembling, to my eyes, big bundles of slightly soiled clouds or enormous, dried-up blobs of papier mâché. As I picked my way through them I had the impression that they were more than merely rubbish that had been dumped and left here over the years, that they were, rather, a kind of detritus extruded by the place itself, a solidified spume that the walls by some process of slow internal decomposition had spontaneously precipitated. And even later on, when I came to rummage through these recrements, they retained for me something of this desiccated, friable texture, and there were times when I fancied that I too from prolonged contact with them was beginning to moulder and would steadily crumble away until nothing remained of me but a shapeless heap of unidentifiable odds and ends. Behind me Francie swore lightheartedly and kicked a cardboard box out of his way. ‘Heavenly Christ,’ he said with a sigh, ‘this place, this place.’
The corridor before me curved a little – the house was all bends and droops and sudden inclines, the result of subsidence, according to Morden, who managed to give the word an infernal resonance – and suddenly I came up against another door, this one open an inch or two. Doors standing ajar like that have always filled me with unease; they seem so knowing and somehow suggestive, like an eye about to wink or a mouth opening to laugh. A strange, intense white light was coming from behind it, spilling through the crack as if a great flare of magnesium were burning in the room beyond. It was only daylight, however, falling from two tall and, so it seemed to me at first, slightly canted, overhanging windows. The room, very high and airy, had the look of an atelier. A thing made of poles and pulleys, like a rack for drying washing, was suspended by ropes from the ceiling, and a large, dirty white sheet that seemed as if it had been stretched right across the room and had fallen down at one side was draped in a diagonal sweep from the corner of a window-frame to the floor, making a dramatic effect that was oddly and unaccountably familiar; the whole thing – the high room, the massed, white light, that cascading sash – might have been a background to one of Jacques Louis David’s revolutionary group portraits. Morden followed my glance and said, ‘The Tennis Court Oath eh?,’ and threw me a sharp, ironical look, his great head thrown back. Thus at the very outset we had a demonstration of his divinatory powers. I took a step backwards, shocked, as if one of the floorboards had sprung up under my foot and smacked me bang on the nose. I could see he was pleased with himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the place is that old, to the very year; amazing, isn’t it?’
He had the look himself of a somewhat later vintage, less David’s Robespierre than Rodin’s Balzac, standing in the middle of the empty floor wrapped in his long coat with his arms folded high up on his massive chest and looking askance at me down his boxer’s big, splayed nose. The eyes – ah, the eyes! That panther glance! I realised two things simultaneously, that he was younger than me by a good ten years, and that I was afraid of him; I did not know which of these two facts I found the more disturbing. I heard Francie moving about softly behind me and for a mad moment I had the notion that he was positioning himself to tackle me, like a henchman in the movies who will suddenly yank the victim’s jacket back and pinion his arms so that the boss in his camel-hair coat and raked fedora may step forward smilingly at his leisure and deliver the hapless hero a haymaker into the breadbasket. After an interval of compressed silence Morden, still fixing me with that glossy black stare, seemed to come to a decision and nodded and muttered, ‘Yes indeed, yes indeed,’ and put on a look that was partly a grin and partly a scowl and turned and paced slowly to the window and stood in silence for a long moment contemplating the building opposite. That coat, though, he cannot have been wearing that greatcoat yet, the weather was still too warm; if I have got that detail wrong what else am I misremembering? Anyway, that is how I see him that day, posed there in the light under those beetling windows with his arms still folded and one leg thrust forward from the skirts of his coat, a big, deep-chested, brooding man with flattened features and a moneyed suntan and a lovingly barbered thick long mane of lustreless red-brown hair.
‘So: here you are,’ he said, as if to set aside what had gone before and start all over again. Already I felt out of breath, as if I were being forced to scramble after him back and forth across a steep incline. ‘Yes, here I am,’ I said, not knowing what else to say. Morden looked past me at Francie and raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Hark: he speaks!’ Then he fixed his level, measuring gaze on me once more. Behind me Francie laughed quietly. Another silence. Prince the dog sat in the doorway, tongue lolling, watching us attentively, its vulpine ears erect and faintly twitching.
I’m sure none of this is as it really happened.
‘I think that you can help me,’ Morden said briskly. ‘I hear you are a man a man might trust.’ He seemed to find that briefly amusing and turned aside a faint smirk. His voice was large, resonating in that big chest, and weighted with odd emphases, deliberately running on and falling over itself as if he wanted to make it known that he had not the time or patience to say all he had to say and therefore the words themselves must work overtime; a manufactured voice. He said he had lately acquired the house – I liked that word, acquired – and added, ‘For development,’ waving a beringed and strangely bloated, bloodless hand. ‘Development, preservation, the two in one; big plans, we have; yes, big plans.’ Now it was Francie’s turn to smirk. Oh, they were having a rollicking time, the two of them. Morden nodded in happy satisfaction, contemplating the future and breathing deep through those wide nostrils as if he were snuffing up the heady smells of fresh-cut timber, bricks and mortar. Then he roused himself and turned from the window, suddenly, energetically cheery. ‘And now, I think, a little toast,’ he said. ‘Francie?’
Francie hesitated and for a moment there was rebellion in the air. I turned and together Morden and I looked at him. In the end he shrugged and gave his side teeth a disdainful suck and slouched off with the dog following close behind him. Morden laughed. ‘He’s a bit of an artist himself, you know, is old Francie,’ he said confidingly.
I felt something relax in me with a sort of creak, as if the pawl and ratchet of a suspended, spring-loaded mechanism in my chest had been eased a notch. Morden went back to his silent contemplation at the window. It was very quiet; we might have been i
n a lift together, the two of us, soundlessly ascending towards I knew not what. I could hear my heart beating; the rate seemed remarkably slow. Strange, the moments like that when everything seems to break free and just drift and anything might happen; it is not like life at all, then, but some other state, conscious and yet dreamy, in which the self hangs weightless in a sort of fevered stillness. Perhaps there is a kind of volition, after all (involuntary volition? – could there be such a thing?), and perhaps it is in intervals such as this one that, unknowingly, we make our judgments, arrive at decisions, commit ourselves. If so, everything I have ever believed in is wrong (belief in this sense is of course a negative quality). It is an intensely invigorating notion. I do not really credit it; I am just playing here, amusing myself in this brief intermission before everything starts up again.
Presently Francie returned with a bottle of champagne and three wine glasses greyed with dust. Morden took the bottle and removed the foil and the wire cap and gave the cork a peremptory twist; I thought of a hunter putting some plump, sleek creature out of its misery. There was an unexpectedly feeble pop and a limp tongue of froth lolled from the neck. The wine was pink and tepid. Francie got none. Morden clinked his dusty glass against mine. ‘To art!’ he said. I drank but he did not, only raised the glass to his lips in dry dumbshow.
We tramped up and down the house, Morden ahead of me swinging the champagne bottle by the neck and his coat billowing and Francie in the rear going along softly at his syncopated slouch with the dog loping close behind him. This forced march had something violent and at the same time faintly preposterous about it. I had a sense of impending, laughable collapse, as in one of those burlesque dreams in which one finds oneself scampering trouserless through a convulsed crowd of hilariously pointing strangers. Solemnly we processed through high rooms with flaking plaster and torn-up floorboards and windows below which the sunlight’s geometry was laid out in complicated sections. Everywhere there was a sense of the place’s mute embarrassment at being seen like this, in such disarray.
‘… A person by the name of Marbot,’ Morden was saying, ‘Josiah Marbot, esquire, gent. of this ward. Great traveller, great builder, great collector, confidant to the King of Naples, guest of Marie Antoinette at the palace of Versailles (they say she had a clitoris as thick as your thumb, did you know that?). There are letters to him from Madame de Somebody, King Whatsit’s mistress. He made his fortune early, in the linen trade: flax from Flanders, hemp from Ghent, weavers from Bayeux. He paddled around the Low Countries picking up whatever he could find; oh yes, a fine eye for a bargain. He never married, and left his fortune to the Anti-Slavery Society or somesuch. Quaker he was, I believe. A real eighteenth-century type.’ He halted abruptly and I almost walked into him. He smelled of shaving balm and the beginnings of gum disease. He was still carrying his glass of champagne untouched. Mine he refilled. ‘At the end, of course, he went peculiar.’ He held the bottle tilted and fixed me with a beadily playful stare, his eyebrows twitching. ‘Shut himself away here in the house, only a manservant for company, years and years, then died. It’s all written up, I’ve read it. Amazing.’
While he spoke my attention was diverted to something behind him that he did not see. We had come to what seemed the dead-end of a corridor with a narrow, tall blank wall before us and no doors visible. The arrangement struck me as peculiar. The dead-end wall was a lath and plaster affair, and in one place, low down, the plaster had crumbled in a big, jigsaw-puzzle shape through which I could see to the other side: daylight and bare floorboards, and something black: black material, velvet, perhaps, which I took to be a curtain or a narrow screen of some sort until suddenly it moved and I glimpsed the flash of a stockinged leg and the spiked heel of a slender black shoe. The dog moaned softly. ‘Now watch this,’ Morden said, and turned to the blind wall, and, pressed his fingers to a hidden switch or something, and with a click the narrow wall turned into a door and swung open on creaking hinges. What a childish thrill it was to see it, a wall opening! I felt like one of RLS’s plucky boy heroes. Beyond was a triangular room with a low, grimed window looking across the street to a brick parapet over the top of which I could see the city’s domed and spiked skyline dusted with September sunlight. The furnishings consisted of a single spindle-backed chair left there by someone and forgotten, and a broad, prolapsed chaise-longue that presented itself to our gaze with an air of elephantine suggestiveness. Stacked against the wall and draped with a mildewed dustsheet were what could only be framed pictures, half a dozen or so (eight, in fact; why this coyness?). I peered about: no one, and nothing, save a tang of perfume that was already so faint it might have been only in my imagination. Morden walked forward with an impresario’s swagger and whisked the dustsheet from the stacked pictures. Have a look, he said, gesturing at them with the champagne bottle, swinging it like an indian club. ‘Just have a look!’ While Francie leaned in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and winked at me, dropping with practised ease a lizard’s leathery eyelid.
1. Pursuit of Daphne ca. 1680
Johann Livelb (1633-1697)
Oil on canvas, 26½ × 67 in. (67.3 × 170.2 cm.)
A product of this artist’s middle age, the Pursuit of Daphne is a skilfully executed, poised yet vigorous, perhaps even somewhat coarse work with uncanny and disturbing undertones. The brooding light which throws the central figures into high relief and bathes the background distances in an unearthly glimmer produces a spectral and almost surreal quality which constitutes what some critics consider the picture’s chief interest. The dimensions of the canvas, a lengthy rectangle, would suggest the painting was commissioned for a specific site, perhaps above a couch or bed; certainly the atmosphere of unrestrained though polished lewdness informing the scene supports the contention (cf. Popov, Popham, Pope-Hennessy) that the work was painted for the boudoir. As always, Livelb adapts his vision to the dictates of available form, and here has used the dimensions of his long, low panel to create a sense of headlong dash appropriate to the theme while yet maintaining a kind of ersatz classical repose, an enervated stillness at the heart of seeming frenzy. The action, proceeding from left to right, strikes the viewer as part of a more extended movement from which the scene has suddenly burst forth, so that the picture seems not quite complete in itself but to be rather the truncated, final section of a running frieze. The artist reinforces the illusion of speed by having the wind blow – and a strong wind it is – not in the faces of pursuer and pursued, as we might expect, but from behind them, as if Aeolus himself had come to urge Apollo on in the chase. Despite this following wind, Daphne’s hair, bound in a purple ribbon, flows back from her shoulders in long, rippling tresses, a sinuous movement that finds an echo in the path of the river Peneus meandering through the distant landscape of the background like a shining, silver serpent. The figure of Cupid with his bow, hovering at the extreme left of the picture, has the aspect less of a god than of a gloating satyr, and there is in his terrible smile not only the light of revenge but also a prurient avidity: he intends to enjoy the spectacle of the rape that he believes he is about to witness. Apollo, love’s bolt buried to the gilded fletching in his right shoulder-blade, cuts a somewhat sorry figure; this is not the lithe ephebe of classical depiction but, probably like the painter himself at the time, a male in his middle years, slack-limbed, thick-waisted, breathing hard, no longer fit for amorous pursuit (there have been suggestions that this is a self-portrait but no evidence has been adduced to support the theory). If Daphne is suffering a transformation so too is the god. We see in the expression of his eyes – how well the painter has captured it! – the desperation and dawning anguish of one about to experience loss, not only of this ravishing girl who is the object of his desire but along with her an essential quality of selfhood, of what up to this he believed he was and now knows he will not be again. His sinewed hand that reaches out to grasp his quarry will never find its hold. Already Daphne is becoming leaf and branch; when we look closely we see th
e patches of bark already appearing through her skin, her slender fingers turning to twigs, her green eyes blossoming. How swooningly the laurel tree leans over her, each fringed leaf (wie eines Windes Lächeln, as Rilke so prettily puts it) eager to enfold her in a transfiguring embrace. We could have done without that indecent pun between the cleft boughs of the tree and the limbs of the fleeing girl. Here as in so much of Livelb’s work the loftiness of the classical theme is sacrificed for the sake of showiness and vulgar effects, and in the end the picture lacks that nobility of purpose and simplicity of execution that a greater artist would have brought to it. To quote the critic Erich Auerbach writing in a different context, what we have here is ‘a highly rhetorical style in which the gruesomely sensory has gained a large place; a sombre and highly rhetorical realism which is totally alien to classical antiquity.’
Aunt Corky was not in fact my aunt but a cousin on my mother’s side so far removed that by her time the bloodline must have become thinned to about the thickness of a corpuscle. She claimed to be Dutch, or Flemish when she thought that sounded fancier, and it is true, I believe, that her people originated in the same hunched hamlet in the Pays-Bas from which my mother’s ancestors had emigrated centuries ago (I see it by Hobbema, of course: a huddle of houses with burnt-sienna roofs, a rutted road and a man in a hat walking along, and two lines of slender poplars diminishing into a dream-blue distance), but she had lived in so many places, and had convinced herself that she had lived in so many more, that she had become blurred, like a statue whose features time has abraded, her self-styled foreignness worn down to a vague, veiled patina. All the same, in places the original lines still stood out in what to me seemed unmistakable relief: she had the Lowlander’s broad, bony forehead and high cheekbones (cf. Dürer’s dauntless drawing of his mother, 1514), and her voice even had a faint, catarrhal catch on certain tricky consonants. When I was a child she was to me completely the continental, a product of steepled towns and different weather and a hotchpotch of impossible languages. Though she was probably younger than my parents, in those days she looked ancient to me, I suppose because she was so ugly, like the witch in a fairy-tale. She was short and squarely built, with a prizefighter’s chest and big square hands with knotted veins; with her squat frame and spindly legs that did not meet at the knees and her always slightly crooked skirts she had the look of an item of furniture, a sideboard, perhaps, or a dining-room table with its flaps down. She carried off her ugliness with a grand hauteur. She was said to have lost a husband in the war; her tragedy was always referred to by this formula, so that I thought of him as not dead but misplaced, a ragged, emaciated figure with desperate eyes wandering amidst cannon-smoke through the great forests and shattered towns of Europe in search of my Aunt Corky (her real name, by the way, was an unpronounceable collision of consonants interspersed with i’s and y’s). She had suffered other things during the war that were referred to only in hushed hints; this was a matter of deep and strangely exciting speculation to me in my fumbling pre-adolescence, and I would picture her bound and splayed in the dank cellar of a barracks in a narrow street beside a canal while a troupe of swastikaed squareheads approached her and … but there, unfed by experience or, as yet, by art, my imagination faltered.
Athena Page 2