Whether she was inspired, or simply vegetable, he felt himself to be the ignorant one. Though Imelda Shacklock seemed unconscious of it. Perhaps she was too intent on what she liked to refer to as ‘being’.
‘I was happiest,’ she said, ‘just after we married and went to live in Vermont. We had a frame house, and not much money – or not much compared with later. I used to bake our bread. The smell of bread and the smell of snow – those are the two purest smells. We were snowed in most of the winter, and I’d put food for the animals that came. I got to know the animals. And I was familiar with every inch of the road to town, from the miles I walked humping the supplies home on my back.’
‘What about your husband – didn’t he help?’
‘Yes. But Clark tires of things. And he was trying to be a writer then.’
‘Didn’t he become one?’
‘Oh, no. He was fortunate to realize early on. And came into the money, and bought the Burtonville Goya. You already know about that.’ Her big creamy face seemed to take it for granted that he was a member of the cult.
‘It’s always a matter of how you see it,’ she went on, ‘of what you make it. Goya anyway – even the real – isn’t everybody’s dish. That doesn’t cancel him out, does it? If it did, it would mean the world is a sense missing – of poetry – or madness – or whatever. So my Burtonville Goya must be allowed to exist for me, and perhaps one or two others – because it’s one of our windows. You see, don’t you? Clark won’t let himself.’
Charles Simpson did not see, but because he could not understand art and his deficiency made him nervous, he answered ‘Yes’ indistinctly enough for it to be interpreted as ‘No’; in this way his conscience was eased.
‘Clark would like to worship,’ Imelda Shacklock continued, ‘but he can’t accept the flaws. Whether in a work of art. Or men. Particularly in women.’ (In different circumstances Charles Simpson might have felt lulled by the goddess’s marble attitudes, most of all by the palimpsest of her confidences.) ‘It makes him restless: he’s always off on another voyage of discovery.’ She looked at Charles with a gravity the more intense for being detached. ‘Whether it’s actual travel, and God knows, we never stop. But I also mean in his personal relationships. And the paintings he collects. After he gave up all idea of ever becoming a writer, he thought there might be a painter in him. But he always ends up where he started: obsessed and inhibited by flaws, and the greatest flaw of all – himself.’
Just then Charles Simpson conceived such a personal vision of Clark Shacklock he might have painted him if he had known how to begin: the eye feverish from perpetual search, lips polished by too many relationships, and a pair of transparent testicles, one of them slung considerably lower than the other.
Charles coughed for his own thoughts.
‘I love him,’ Imelda said with that contralto seriousness in which American women specialize.
Charles and Ivy would never have spoken openly of ‘love’, not together, let alone to a stranger.
So he asked, ‘Do you find the Fiat a satisfactory car? In performance,’ he added unnecessarily.
Mrs Shacklock dealt with the question as though it were the natural outcome of their conversation. ‘Fair enough. Considering it’s a rented machine. If it was your own, that would be another situation.’ She spoke with the same seriousness she had used while dwelling on the subject of her husband.
Then she turned her wrist to look at her watch, an ordinary one she was wearing on a man’s old sloppy strap. ‘I guess Clark will have run up to take another look at San Fabrizio. There are those who consider him superficial. But I know, Dr Simpson – I ought to know by now – just what makes Clark Shacklock tick. Clark is a law unto himself and his own sensitivity. Whether it’s a church or – or a person – he’s got to explore them in his own fashion.’
Charles Simpson sat farther forward on the edge of his chair. ‘Does he share his reactions with you?’
‘I don’t encourage it,’ Imelda Shacklock said, ‘never ever. A sensitive soul’s reactions are too sensitive, don’t you think? Besides, if you take a stick and start stirring around, you can fetch out something which doesn’t appeal. As we know from experience, don’t we, Doctor? from experience of our own selves.’
Mrs Shacklock shook back her loosely strapped watch to where she wore it, on her wrist’s under side. On the same hand she was wearing that slumberous stone which must have cost a discreet fortune. Charles Simpson felt tempted to ask whether the ring was a love token, or simply an object with which her husband had formed a sensitive, but temporary, attachment. It was a thought which might have amused Ivy, in different circumstances.
Ivy Simpson and Clark Shacklock were received inside this jewel of light and refracted sound. The words of psalms were falling slumberously as wax (… il suo cuore è saldo perché confida nel Signore, il suo animo è tranquillo; non temeràed infine vedrà la rovina dei nemici…) when they were not ascending in smoke (… ma il desiderio dell’empio è destinato a perire …) Here and there an individual word scintillated perceptibly before it splintered into fragments of glass. The saints primly contained by their golden mirrors might not have believed all they had heard and witnessed over the centuries, least of all in the present. She averted her face from them. If she succeeded in fainting, she would be carried out, and avoid the shame reserved for her; though of course what she feared worst of all was the alternative: a shaky apotheosis under the eye of the Pantocrator. (How would she ever confess her apostasy to Charles?) Lie down then along this row of chairs. Too tidy for a faint, it might be accepted as the prelude to a coronary. But her other plan weighed so heavily on her, it was this which must prevail. Aubrey would make sure that Clark didn’t miss his cue, one gross male prompting another to fall into the trap she had helped devise. In advance she could hear chairs creaking, rush bottoms disintegrating, legs tottering giving way under the double weight. Faces turn, breath hisses as the silken ladder of liturgy is snapped. Eyes hunger to assist at a common adultery, the officiating priest most involved of all on finding himself under instruction.
Actually the priest, another fat, hairy man, continued concentrating on his office, his flock of the kind one would have expected: elderly or crippled women, two or three thin, fluting men, a girl suffering from acne, another from chlorosis, a pair of nuns, the contours of their backs straining against their blue habits, only the forehead and the eyes of a brachycephalous dwarf.
(Am I one of them? If I am only faintly prospective I must make every effort not to be.)
Clark Shacklock had lowered his voice out of respect for the devotions of the faithful. ‘From one standpoint, Ivy, we couldn’t have come at a worse time. We can’t very well barge through to the apse, and I’d like to show you, amongst other things, the sarcophagi. Still, it’s the overall impression, I think you’ll agree, that counts at San Fabrizio. Daylight and a guidebook don’t do justice to it.’
If he were preparing to convert her through the reverential humdrum she would resist him on his own ground.
Screwing up her mouth and eyes as she stared heavenward, Ivy Simpson ricked her neck. ‘Architecturally,’ she mumbled, ‘it’s very fine. I’ll grant you that.’
Charles Shacklock boggled so hugely she might have been his wife. ‘You’re surely the first person who had reservations about San Fabrizio.’
‘Not reservations. I have my limitations, Clark, even if you despise me for them.’
‘But the mosaics alone!’ To persuade her he fumbled for her hand. ‘See here in the nave – The Story of Genesis …’
Restricted by the observances of others (… come era in principio, ora e sempre e nei secoli dei secoli …) their progress was crabwise.
‘And there’s The Evangelizing of St Peter and St Paul. In the sanctuary – if we could take a proper look – which we can’t, all considered – we’d find a very beautiful Passion.’
(Oh the Passion frightening word the tears of blood you have never sh
ed stillborn is not a real one not a dead husband either in that incredible event you might bow your head along with the dust-coloured gentlewomen the cripples the male lost souls and learn from nuns how to climb a ladder of prayer.)
‘… but the most magnificent of all, Ivy, is the Pantocrator.’
This was not why she had come to San Fabrizio with Clark Shacklock, the commonplace, perspiring American. She would not look at the Pantocrator. She would rather shut her eyes tight, close her mind to intellectual duplicity. Or discover her own, vulgar, fleshly self.
She dropped her bag. Unlike Mother’s Lalique bowl, it didn’t break, but she knew it was a measure Aubrey would approve of.
Here was Clark Shacklock groping with her to retrieve the bag from the Cosmati paving (‘particularly fine’, she had read in advance in her own guidebook). It was herself, however, clawing at Clark as though his solid bulk might save. Under the Pantocrator’s eye. Surrounded by the scraggy saints. Words rigid words ascending (… Tu della luce splendida Creatore mirabile che tra la luce fulgida al mondo desti origine …)
‘What is it, Ivy? Aren’t you well?’
No, she was sick.
‘Yes, I’m well,’ she snickered. ‘It is only – I will tell you – Clark.’
She could have vomited over the brown tripe the two of them were preparing to hang from ancient rust-eaten nails in the glass duomo, but instead she was dragging Him (her Lover) into this obscure side chapel, stumbling over the dust-clogged carpet of rucked-up marble.
Clark was panting. ‘I’ll say you’ve got an instinct. This may not be in the same class as Caravaggio, but it’s not bad for a Reni. Let’s give him credit where credit’s due.’
In the dark chapel it was almost impossible to see the saint’s painted face (her instinctive less than scarafaggio) and only from close up the filmic expressions of any human one.
For a reason he too must have begun to understand, they were both filled with a suppressed laughter. She felt his corrugations of fat rub against her pleasingly.
I was never credited with the fat self I have been disguising, Ivy now knew.
Her laughter broke and ricochetted.
One of the emaciated gentlewomen taking part in that other ceremony beneath the high altar pointed her nose in the direction of the irreverent noises she might have heard. Her nostrils scented a blasphemy, the bony structure accused, or as much of it as you could see for lace the colour of incense with which she was coiffed. Till sanctity or partial deafness intervened: the lady was appeased.
Whereas obscene laughter continued to inflate Ivy Simpson. ‘Sponge fingers!’ It burst out of her like ripped rubber.
Clark Shacklock’s eyes were glittering between shared hilarity and suppressed horror. Whether he realized or not, the thin and upright worshippers were of a predominating beige powdered with light, the exceptions being the dwarf, whose monstrous head remained a dark world of its own, and of course the blue, larded nuns.
What he could never have understood was that the laughter bouncing her against him was causing her pain, as was memory, dinning into her the words how a Tyndall ever sired a sponge finger I’m at a loss to know Ivy after those full lips had rejected the insipid stuff which roused his disgust.
As Clark Shacklock was sucked into the whirlpool of her only half-controlled laughter, he was clutching at Ivy Simpson. Or was it she at him? In the darkened chapel it was hard to tell. Certainly she needed support, however brutally his buttons grazed her.
‘We mustn’t lose our balance!’ she hiccupped.
Several anonymous faces were turned in their direction from the world of light. But faith no doubt protected the worshippers from contagion. Even while the silken ladder spun by the officiating priest was plunging under them, they were in a position to dismiss fantasies. As for the priest himself, his own voice had probably prevented him hearing a word. The voice, becoming increasingly real, hammered on her conscience like fists.
On the other hand her companion, it seemed, had caught her sickness: she could tell from the texture, the fever of his cheek, as they heaved and ducked together amongst the extinguished candles of this infernal grotto. Their surroundings smelt of dead wax. While outside, the glass saints, who should have been recoiling, fluctuating, held their original attitudes of grace.
Wasn’t it time, surely, for the faithful to advance and receive their reward?
‘When do they communicate?’ she asked with fearful hope.
Put that way it would have sounded less reprehensible, more Protestant, if not sociological, to Charles, should he have overheard.
‘Never communion at vespers!’ Clark Shacklock spoke with authority.
She was convinced he was the RC she had suspected; so she was committing the triple blasphemy: against her honest husband, their enlightenment, and most grievously, their love for each other.
Now only Aubrey Tyndall was laughing: the sensual man who had never recognized her in his lifetime, but whom she had nourished inside her for all of hers.
All that was happening should have been enough, but she visualized the nuns’ greed as the pitiful wafer collapsed in their mouths, and regretted her lost opportunity to blaspheme in addition against the Holy Ghost.
Her own hunger, laughter, or whatever, had made her slobber. She could feel it on her chin.
‘… Ivy, this is something serious. This is where I fetch the …’
With bell, book, and candle!
‘No, Clark, I am truly – I – you must stay with me and we shall discuss – that is the only way to approach any serious personal matter – can’t you see?’
He couldn’t, not in the dark.
‘But you’re not well. You’re sick, Ivy!’
At dust level she could smell his words, those of a frightened man. Like two landed fish, they were lunging together, snout bruising snout, on the rucked-up Cosmati paving. She wrapped herself around him, her slimy thighs, the veils of her fins, as it had been planned, seemingly, from the beginning, while the enormous tear swelled to overflowing in the glass eye focused on them from the golden dome.
So we float conjoined long after the lights are doused at times it is I who sit astride this giant porpoise at others my fragile bones are supporting an intolerable weight strength comes with degradation it appears the lower you sink the easier to survive while actually floating high expelled into an outer darkness which does not obstruct vision since I have become vision itself gaining height through the sooty masses of leaves above the only slightly abrasive towers and dome I can look down always floating I can see inside the box in which He my Dearly Beloved Husband has thrown off the sheet is rising from amongst the limp grey wrinkles on the yellow bed offering Himself afresh for sacrifice under the extinct acryllic object.
She could feel the pattern in the Cosmati paving with the tips of her returning fingers. By now the great edifice would have been in darkness if its glass walls had not given off a perpetual glimmer. That it was not completely deserted she could also tell because somebody was breathing above and around her. She felt what must be a bunch of bananas, or large hand, fumbling with her face, then a cold, heavy – bracelet? dangled across one of her cheeks.
‘Are you okay, Ivy?’ Clark Shacklock was inquiring rather tremulously.
‘Where are we?’ she asked as it became only too apparent.
‘Exactly where we were.’
‘But dark!’
‘Yes. And we’ve probably been locked in.’
She was so annoyed she almost bit the hand still dabbling in her cheek. ‘What? And you didn’t stop them?’
‘To tell the truth, I was too relieved to find they could overlook us. I lay low.’
She began feeling her way, first past this man’s thighs – he was so substantial there was no avoiding Clark Shacklock – then through the faintly luminous darkness.
‘What on earth will Charles …? My husband is expecting his dinner!’
‘They’ll both be wondering why we’re lat
e,’ Clark Shacklock chanted back; the walls made plainsong out of it.
Ivy Simpson was charging at chairs: some of them she sent squealing and skittering across the marble on slate-pencil legs; others crashed in blocks, and in some cases, were smashed, it sounded.
The Shacklock voice came bowling after her. ‘Put the brakes on, Ivy! If we separate, there’s no knowing when we’ll find each other.’
She was so desperate she had to blame somebody. ‘You could have prevented us getting into a mess like this. So you’ll have to get us out. There must be a door, isn’t there? for an emergency?’ It did not seem in any way peculiar that her voice should be shouting inside the deserted duomo at this unreliable, in every way undesirable, stranger.
They continued, separately, assaulting darkness. A metal bird, poised for flight, plunged its beak into Ivy Simpson’s shoulder. If she broke a limb it would not be an American but Charles her husband who would care.
‘Ivy?’
The noisome Clark had found her and was again taking her hand. ‘Don’t lose your head. We’re more likely to find a way out if we stick together.’
Prudence alone persuaded her to accept his advice; after which they blundered as one, though without design. There had never been any, had there? not even by honest daylight – only a hopeful blindness. So they continued stumbling, and stubbing themselves, hand in hand like lovers, the love frightened out of them.
He thought he remembered a minor door, if they could reach it, somewhere near the sanctuary.
‘Oh? Well, of course there must be a door – DOORS! What if a priest got locked in?’
When she was almost glad to have him with her, Clark Shacklock said, ‘I guess a priest would settle down to a night of prayer.’
She could not bear this man, but had to submit to his sweaty hand.
‘Think of waking with the saints,’ he encouraged, ‘slowly surfacing, like fish in a tank. Then, shaking off the water. And catching fire.’
Oh, she couldn’t endure it! At least Charles would know that something unavoidable had detained her. But would he imagine – oh God! as she would in similar circumstances – that she was dead?
The Cockatoos Page 23