by A. S. Byatt
He felt for his idea of what was behind all this diversity, all this interest. At the back was an intricate and extravagantly prolific maker. Sometimes, listening to silence, alone with himself, he heard the irregular but endlessly repeated crash of waves on a pebbled shore. His body was a porcelain-fine arched shell, sculpted who knew how, containing this roar and plash. And the drag of the moon, and the elliptical course of the planets. More often, a madly ingenious inner eye magnified small motions of flesh and blood. The twinge had become a tugging and raking in what he now feared, prophetically it turned out, was his liver. Livers were used for augury, the shining liver, the smoking liver, the Babylonians thought, was the seat of the soul: his own lay athwart him and was intimately and mysteriously connected with the lumpy pothooks. And with the inner eye which might or might not be seated in that pineal gland where Descartes located the soul. A man has no more measured the mysteries of his internal whistlings and flowings, he thought, than he has measured the foundations of the earth or of the whirlwind. It was his covert principle to give true opinions to great liars, and to that other fraudulent resuscitator of dead souls, and filler of mobile gloves, David Sludge the Medium, he had given a vision of the minutiae of intelligence which was near enough his own. “We find great things are made of little things,” he had made Sludge say, “And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”
“The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst
The simplest of creations, just a sac
That’s mouth, heart, legs and belly at once, yet lives
And feels and could do neither, we conclude
If simplified still further one degree.”
“But go back and back, as you please, at the back, as Mr Sludge is made to insist,” he had written, “you find (my faith is as constant) creative intelligence, acting as matter but not resulting from it. Once set the balls rolling and ball may hit ball and send any number in any direction over the table; but I believe in the cue pushed by a hand.” All the world speaks the Name, as the true David truly saw: even the uneasy inflamed cells of my twinges. At the back, is something simple, undifferentiated, indifferently intelligent, live.
My best times are those when I approximate most closely to that state.
She put her hand on the knob of his door, and pushed it open without knocking. It was dark, a light, smoky dark; the window curtains were not drawn and the windows were a couple of vague, star-lighted apertures. She saw things, a rug thrown over a chair, a valise, a dim shape hunched and silver-topped, which turned out to be her brother, back towards her, at the writing-table. “Oh, if you’re busy,” she said, “I won’t disturb you.” And then, “You can’t write in the dark, Robert, it is bad for your eyes.” He shook himself, like a great seal coming up from the depths, and his eyes, dark spaces under craggy brows, turned unseeing in her direction. “I don’t want to disturb you,” she said again, patiently waiting for his return to the land of the living. “You don’t,” he said, “dear Sarianna. I was only thinking about Descartes. And it must be more than time for dinner.” “There is a woman here,” Sarianna confided, as they walked down the corridor, past a servant carrying candles, “with an aviary on her head, who is an admirer of your poems and wishes to join the Browning society.” “Il me semble que ce genre de chose frise le ridicule,” he said, growlingly, and she smiled to herself, for she knew that when he was introduced to the formidable Mrs Miller he would be everything that was agreeable and interested.
* * *
And the next day, on the hotel terrace, he was quite charming to his corseted and bustled admirer, who begged him to write in her birthday book, already graced by Lord Leighton and Thomas Trollope, who was indulgent when he professed not to remember on which of two days he had been born — was it May 7th or May 9th, he never could be certain, he said, appealing to Sarianna, who could. He had found some better ink, and copied out, as he occasionally did, in microscopic handwriting, “All that I know of a certain star”, adding with a bluff smile, “I always end up writing the same thing; I vary only the size. I should be more inventive.” Mrs Miller protested that his eyesight must be exquisitely fine, closing the scented leather over the hand-painted wreaths of pansies that encircled the precious script. Her hat was monumental, a circle of wings; the poet admired it, and asked detailed questions about its composition, owls, hawks, jays, swallows, encircling an entire dove. He showed considerable familiarity with Paris prints and the vagaries of modistes. His public self had its own version of the indiscriminate interest in everything which was the virtue of the last Duchess, Karshish, Lazarus and Smart. He could not know how much this trait was to irritate Henry James, who labelled it bourgeois, whose fictional alter ego confessed to feeling a despair at his “way of liking one subject — so far as I could tell — precisely as much as another”. He addressed himself to women exactly as he addressed himself to men, this affronted narrator complained; he gossiped to all men alike, talking no better to clever folk than to dull. He was loud and cheerful and copious. His opinions were sound and second-rate, and of his perceptions it was too mystifying to think. He seemed quite happy in the company of the insistent Mrs Miller, telling her about the projected visit to the Fishwick family, who had a house in the Apennines. Mrs Miller nodded vigorously under the wings of the dove, and leapt into vibrant recitation. “What I love best in all the world Is a castle, precipice-encurled In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennines.” “Exactly so,” said the benign old man, sipping his port, looking at the distant mountains, watched by Sarianna, who knew that he was braced against the Apennines as a test, that he had never since her death ventured so near the city in which he had been happy with his wife, in which he was never to set foot again. The Fishwicks’ villa was in a remote village unvisited in that earlier time. He meant to attempt that climb, as he had attempted this. He needed to be undaunted. It was his idea of himself that he was undaunted. And so he was, Sarianna thought, with love. “Then we may proceed to Venice,” said the poet to the lady in the hat, “where we have very kind friends and many fond memories. I should not be averse to dying in Venice. When my time comes.”
IV
“What will he make of us?” Miss Juliana Fishwick enquired, speaking of the imminent Robert Browning, and in fact more concerned with what her companion, Mr Joshua Riddell, did make of them, of the Fishwick family and way of life, of the Villa Colomba, perched in its coign of cliff, with its rough lawn and paved rooms and heavy ancient furnishings. She was perhaps the only person in the company to care greatly what anybody made of anybody; the others were all either too old and easygoing or too young and intent on their journeys of discovery and complicated games. Joshua Riddell replied truthfully that he found them all enchanting, and the place too, and was sure that Mr Browning would be enchanted. He was a friend of Juliana’s brother, Tom. They were at Balliol College, reading Greats. Joshua’s father was a Canon of St Paul’s. Joshua lived a regular and circumspect life at home, where he was an only child, of whom much was expected. He expected very much of himself, too, though not in the line of his parents’ hopes, the Bar, the House of Commons, the judiciary. He meant to be a great painter. He meant to do something quite new, which would have authority. He knew he should recognize this, when he had learned what it was, and how to do it. For the time being, living in its necessarily vague yet brilliant presence was both urgent and thwarting. He described it to no one; certainly not to Tom, with whom he was able, surprisingly, to share ordinary jokes and japes. He was entirely unused to the degree of playfulness and informality of Tom’s family.
He was sketching Juliana. She was sitting, in her pink muslin, on the edge of the fountain basin. The fountain bubbled in an endless chuckling waterfall out of a cleft in the rockside. This was the lower fountain, furthest from the house, on a rough lawn on which stood an ancient stone table and chairs. Above the fountain someone had carved a round, sun-like face, flat and calmly beaming, with two uplifted, flat-palmed hands pushing thr
ough, or poised on, the rock face beside it. No one knew how old or new it was. In the upper garden, where there were flowerbeds and a slower, lead-piped fountain, was a pillar or herm surmounted with a head which, Solomon Fishwick had pointed out, was exactly the same as the heads on the covers of the hominiform Etruscan funerary urns. Joshua had made several drawings of these carvings. Juliana’s living face, under her straw hat, was a different challenge. It was a face composed of softness and the smooth solid texture of young flesh, without pronounced bones, hard to capture. The blonde eyebrows did not stand out; the eyes were not emphasized by long lashes, only by a silver-white fringe which caught the sunlight here and there. The upper lip sloped upwards; the mouth was always slightly parted, the expression gently questioning, not insisting on an answer. It was an extremely pleasant face, with no salient characteristics. How to draw softness, and youth, and sheer pleasantness? Her arms should be full of an abundance of something; apples, rosebuds, a cascade of corn. She held her little hands awkwardly, clasping and unclasping them over her pink skirts.
Juliana was more used to looking than to being looked at. She supposed she was not pretty, though passable, not by any means grotesque. She had an unfortunate body for this year’s narrow styles, which required height, an imposing bosom, a flat stomach, an upright carriage. She was round and short, though she had a good enough waist; corseting did violence to her, and in the summer heat in Italy was impossible. So she was conscious of rolls and half-moons and sausages of flesh which she would dearly have wished otherwise. She had pretty ankles and wrists, she knew, and had stockings of a lovely rose pink with butterfly-shells embroidered on them. Her elder sister, Annabel, visiting in Venice, was a beauty, much courted, much consulted about dashing little hats. Juliana supposed she might herself have trouble in finding a husband. She was not remarkable. She was afraid she might simply pass from being a shepherding elder sister to being a useful aunt. She was marvellous with the little ones. She played and tumbled and comforted and cleaned and sympathized, and wanted something of her own, some place, some thought, some silence that should be hers only. She did not expect to find it. She had a practical nature and liked comfort. She had been invaluable in helping to bestow the family goods and chattels in the two heavy carriages which had made their way up the hill, from the heat of Florence to this airy and sunny garden state. Everything had had to go in: baths and fish-kettles, bolsters and jelly-moulds, cats, dogs, birdcage and dolls’ house. She had sat in the nursery carriage, with Nanny and Nurse and the restive little ones: Tom and Joshua had gone ahead with her parents and the household staff, English and Italian, had come behind. On the hot leather seat, she was impinged upon by Nurse’s starched petticoats on one side, and the entwined, struggling limbs of Arthur and Gwendolen battling for space, for air on the other. When the climb became steep spare mules were attached, called trapeli, each with its attendant groom, groaning and coughing on the steeper and steeper turns, whilst the men went at strolling pace and the horses skidded and lay back in their collars leaving the toiling to the mules. She found their patient effort exemplary: she had given them all apples when they arrived.
She was in awe of Joshua, though not of Tom. Tom teased her, as he always had, amiably. Joshua spoke courteously to her as though she was as knowledgeable as Tom about Horace and Ruskin; this was probably because he had no experience of sisters and only a limited experience of young women. Her father had taught her a little Latin and Greek; her governess had taught her French, Italian, needlework, drawing and the use of the globes, accomplishments she was now imparting to Gwendolen, and Arthur and little Edith. They seemed useless, not because they were uninteresting but because they were like feathers stitched on to a hat, dead decorations, not life. They were life to Joshua; she could see that. His manner was fastidious and aloof, but he had been visibly shaken, before the peregrination to the Villa Colomba, by the outing they had made from Florence to Vallombrosa, with its sweeping inclines and steep declivities all clothed with the chestnut trees, dark green shades “high overarched indeed, exactly,” Joshua had said, and had added, “You can see that these leaves, being deciduous, will strow the brooks, thickly, like the dead souls in Virgil and Milton’s fallen angels.” She had looked at the chestnut trees, suddenly seeing them, because he asked her to. They clothed the mountains here, too. The peasants lived off chestnuts: their cottages had chestnut-drying lofts, their women ground chestnut flour in stone mortars.
When they had first rushed into the Villa Colomba, chirruping children and pinch-mouthed, disapproving cook, and had found nothing but echoing, cool space between the thick walls with their barred slit windows, she had looked to Joshua in alarm, whilst the children cried out, “Where are the chairs and tables?” He had found an immense hour glass, in a niche over the huge cavernous hearth, and said, smilingly, “We are indeed in another time, a Saturnine time.” Civilization, it turned out, existed upstairs, though cook complained mightily of ageing rusty iron pots and a ratcheted spit like a diabolical instrument of torture. Everything was massive and ancient: oak tables on a forest of oak pillars, huge leather-backed thrones, beds with heavy gilded hangings, chests ingeniously carved on clawed feet, too heavy to lift, tombs, Tom said, for curious girls. “A house for giants,” Joshua said to Juliana, seeing her intrigue and anxiety both clearly. He drew her attention to the huge wrought-iron handles of the keys. “We are out of the nineteenth century entirely,” he said. The walls of the salone were furnished with a series of portraits, silver-wigged and dark-eyed and rigid. Joshua’s bedroom had a fearful and appalling painting of fruits and flowers so arranged as to form a kind of human form, bristling with pineapple spines, curvaceous with melons, staring through passionflower eyes. “That,” said Juliana, “is bound to appeal to Mr Browning, who is interested in the grotesque.” Tom said he would not make much of the family portraits, which were so similar as to argue a significant want of skill in the painter. “Either that, or a striking family resemblance,” said Joshua. “Or a painter whose efforts all turn out to resemble his own appearance. I have known one or two portraiture painters like that.” Sitting now on the rim of the fountain trough, watching him frown over his drawing, look up, correct, frown and scribble, she wondered if by some extraordinary process her undistinguished features might be brought to resemble his keen and handsome ones. He was gipsyish in colouring, and well-groomed by habit, a kind of contradiction. Here in the mountains he wore a loose jacket and a silk scarf knotted at his neck, but knotted too neatly. He was smaller and thinner than Tom.
Joshua worked on the mouth corner. He had chosen a very soft, silvery pencil for this very soft skin: he did not want to draw a caricature in a few sparing lines, he wanted somehow to convey the nature of the solidity of the flesh of cheek and chin. He had mapped in the rounds and ovals, of the whole head and the hat brim, and the descending curve of the looped plait in the nape of Juliana’s neck, and the spot where her ear came, and parts of the calm wide forehead. The shadow cast on the flesh by the circumference of the hat was another pleasant problem in tone and shading. He worked in little, circling movements, feeling out little clefts with the stub of his pencil, isolating tiny white patches of light that shone on the ledge of the lip or the point of the chin, leaving this untouched paper to glitter by contrast with his working. He filled out the plump underthroat with love; so it gave a little, so it was taut.
“I wish I could see,” said Juliana, “what you are doing.”
“When it is done.”
It was almost as if he was touching the face, watching its grey shape swim into existence out of a spider web of marks. His hand hovered over where the nose would be, curled a nostril, dented its flare. If anywhere he put dark marks where light should be, it was ruined. No two artists’ marks are the same, no more than their thumbprints. Behind Juliana’s head he did the edge, no more, of the flat stony texture of the solar face.
Juliana kept still. Her anxieties about Mr Browning and the massive awkwardness of th
eir temporary home were calmed. Joshua’s tentative pencil began to explore the area of the eyes. The eyes were difficult. They must first be modelled — the life was conferred by the pinpoint of dark and the flecks of white light, and the exact distances between them. He had studied the amazing eyes created by Rembrandt van Rijn, a precise little bristling, fine, hair-like movement of the brush, a spot of crimson here, a thread of carmine there, a spider-web paste of colour out of which a soul suddenly stared. “Please look at me,” he said to Juliana, “please look at me — yes, like that — and don’t move.” His pencil point hovered, thinking, and Juliana’s pupils contracted in the greenish halo of the iris, as she looked into the light, and blinked, involuntarily. She did not want to stare at him; it was unnatural, though his considering gaze, measuring, drawing back, turning to one side and the other, seemed natural enough. A flood of colour moved darkly up her throat, along her chin, into the planes and convexities of her cheeks. Tears collected, unbidden, without cause. Joshua noted the deepening of colour, and then the glisten, and ceased to caress the paper with the pencil. Their eyes met. What a complicated thing is this meeting of eyes, which disturbs the air between two still faces, which has its effects on the heartbeat, the hair on the wrists, the flow of blood. You can understand, Joshua thought, why poets talk of arrows, or of hooks thrown. He said, “How odd it is to look at someone, after all, and to see their soul looking back again. How can a pencil catch that? How do we know we see each other?”