Octavius made no jokes about artistic education. He said that Gloria and Kirstie (for he seldom said anything about Gloria that he didn’t say about Kirstie as well) were developing a historical sense. He also said that they were extremely good shoppers – and he accompanied them more than once, and with every appearance of enthusiasm rather than indulgence, down the winding course of the Mercerie for this purpose. The multiplicity of beguiling boutiques in these narrow streets defies computation, and if many turn out to sell precisely the same wares as others there is at least the possibility of exciting novelty in every one. Both young women thought of a surprising number of friends for whom small presents might appropriately be taken home, and they spent their money accordingly. What you had bought here in the cinquecento, Octavius said, had been silks and damasks and cloth of gold. But he flinched at absolutely nothing directed to a more modern taste, and even commended to Kirstie a diminutive plastic gondola which could be pleasingly illuminated through the agency of an equally diminutive electric battery.
Gloria didn’t trust this enthusiasm a bit. She could even imagine some of the derisive things Octavius would say if describing these purchases to somebody of his own sort – his employer Mr Domberg, for example. The girls had filled a small portmanteau with objects suitable for raffling in an institution for the blind. That would be the kind of fun Octavius would produce. The thought of it didn’t offend Gloria in the least. She was even coming to feel that, in the past, she had perhaps too regularly written off this particular sort of young man. Why shouldn’t one enjoy the society of people with quite different tastes from oneself? And if one didn’t mind being less clever than clever people (and Gloria didn’t feel she did) couldn’t one get a great deal of entertainment from them? This second question was receiving an affirmative answer all the time. The Italian holiday had livened up a great deal during the past week.
Of course the turning up of any other lively young man might have had the same effect. But there was another thing about Octavius Chevalley which was much more of an individual matter and dimly portentous. He’d never again come to give Gloria the kind of glance he’d given her from Domberg’s car.
Gloria’s knowledge of this was intuitive – and like much knowledge intuitively come by it had a disturbing quality. The narrow little shops in the Merceria di San Giuliano or the Merceria di San Salvatore have entrances correspondingly narrow. Gloria had to exercise some care in slipping through them. But the fact that this didn’t produce a flicker from Octavius was not a consequence of his minding his manners better than on a former occasion. Nor was it simply that he’d ceased to bother his head with her physical presence, in a way that she knew a young man can do when he has made a familiar companion of you and has no other views whatever. Octavius was aware of her – aware of her, one might say, still in terms of the scales and the tape-measure. But his attitude to the reports these brought him had somehow changed. She wondered obscurely whether this had something to do with Palma Vecchio and (for that matter) Titian. She also wondered – but this brought her to ground yet more obscure – whether Octavius was at all an effective young man in point of the sort of activities these thoughts adumbrated.
This was the state of affairs when Kirstie made her rather surprising suggestion that they go out in a gondola.
It was surprising because made somewhat in the face of social convention. Young people are very conscious of what, as an age-group, young people do or don’t do. And they don’t, on the whole, potter around the canals of Venice, or voyage at large on its lagoon, in gondolas. Gondolas are expensive, tortoise-like, and really rather dull; they are also sticky with bogus romantic associations. Elderly Americans, the sort whose garments are lined with travellers cheques, go around in gondolas, solemnly whirring their movie-cameras as they glide. Kirstie was aware of all this. She knew she was poor; she suspected Octavius of being poor; she divined that Gloria had come abroad partly in order to escape for a little longer from the poor-little-rich-girl business which was creeping up on her. But Kirstie said that in Venice one sailed in a gondola. As she was undoubtedly right, her insistence deserved better fortune than it actually met with.
Octavius, entering agreeably into the spirit of her enterprise, gave the proposal a good deal of thought. It seemed simple enough to Gloria; you merely walked down to the Molo and stepped into one of the things as if it was a taxi. But Octavius started the idea that he could borrow a craft of superior comfort and consequence from an elderly Italian lady resident in Venice; there would be the further advantage of the trip’s being for free, apart from the handsome tip to the two liveried servants who would provide motive power. But on this proposal he went progressively vaguer as the day wore on – perhaps because the contessa or whoever she was existed only in his imagination; more probably (Gloria felt shrewdly sure) because he had developed misgivings about showing off. That misgivings distinguishably tenanted a good many odd corners of Octavius’s mind was one of the attractive things about him.
However this may have been, its consequence was that the project became a nocturnal one. That was what Kirstie really wanted: she pointed out there was a moon. The stickiest romance of all attends, of course, upon gondolas by moonlight, and Gloria felt she must by no means counter or abridge this small enclave of adolescent Sehnsucht in her almost undeviatingly rational friend. (Gloria didn’t, indeed, employ this sort of language to herself. But chroniclers have their occasional privileges.)
Octavius supported the new idea. It would add, he explained on an easy and brotherly note, thirty per cent to the bill. But it would undoubtedly be worth it – at least if it didn’t turn too chilly. He would have the chap clap on the felze, he learnedly added, instead of the tenda, and then they’d be as snug as need be.
The felze proved to be a kind of portable wooden shed, and Gloria felt that the effect was of being in a floating chicken-coop. This was at least better than being in a floating coffin, which was how gondolas, perhaps on account of their sombre hue, commonly struck her. At least their gondolier bore no resemblance to an undertaker. He was a young man and almost wickedly handsome. He cultivated – for professional purposes, no doubt – the appearance of a corsair. And he sang.
Having formed the opinion – erroneously, and because the gentleman spoke Italian – that the ladies were cultivated persons, the gondolier sang Monteverde. Gloria found what are called unprepared dissonances startling, but concluded that the lyric was being intervolved with those weird alerting cries which those who hire gondolas expect to have thrown in for their money. Even although there was singing elsewhere on the water – quite a lot of it – the set up was all mildly embarrassing. She knew perfectly well that the man wasn’t singing because he felt that way. He’d had a long day senselessly standing in for a simple out-board petrol engine; he was probably very considerably bored, and looking forward only to a final stupefying swig of grappa and to tumbling into bed.
Octavius must have caught hold of the mortuary suggestion, since he announced that they were going where the cold sea raves by Lido’s wet accursed graves – a thought from the poet Browning which neither lady was in a position to appreciate. The expedition modulated into success, all the same. The moon was there, and so was Venice. And to this combination of circumstances it was impossible not to respond.
Gloria responded, whether relevantly or not, by advancing Octavius further in her regard. She still gave a thought from time to time to Harry (of whom she had been reminded, indeed, by certain aspects of the gondolier’s physique), but it was by way of thinking how different Harry was from Octavius, and Octavius from Harry. She wasn’t consciously disposed to put these two young men in an order of merit. What was chiefly attractive in young men – she had come to feel – was the unlikeness between one and another; their diversity made for interest rather more than did what they seemed monotonously to be liable to have in common. Even when you had only one at all substantially in your head it was still in his distinguishing signs and trait
s that the fascination lay. And now Octavius in the foreground drew an additional charm from a contrasting Harry who had withdrawn into the middle distance. Yet even at this degree of relegation, it may be, Harry had for Gloria a residual small clear meaning which was the sharper for Octavius’s standing where he did.
In fact, of course, Octavius was sitting – side by side with Kirstie in their little floating room. He had put an arm round Kirstie. Or, if not precisely that, he had put an arm behind her. Gloria could have stretched out her own arm and touched either of them, and this made it odd that she couldn’t hear what Octavius was saying. But then Octavius was murmuring rather than talking – and murmuring into Kirstie’s ear.
This was a sudden discovery, and it was a second or two before Gloria was quite clear that her feeling before the spectacle was the correct feeling of benevolent amusement. It was entirely in order that Octavius should mildly flirt with Kirstie, since Kirstie was a very attractive young woman. And she was glad, she told herself, that he wasn’t trying to flirt with her, at least in a chicken-coop. Madame Bovary had never come Gloria’s way, but her own experience had made her think poorly of amorous advance in hired conveyances.
Not that Octavius was doing much. Within the shadowy felze it wasn’t easy, and of course it wouldn’t have been proper, really to see. But Gloria had a strong impression that decorum – it didn’t occur to her as anything more fundamental in Octavius than that – was imposing a marked brake on the proceedings. Since she was now distinctly jealous of Kirstie – amusement, sad to say, had been evanescent humbug – she ought to have found some satisfaction or at least solace in this continence. Strangely enough, it irritated her and increased her uneasiness. If Octavius felt that way – and, once more, why shouldn’t he? – he ought to be able to get on with it.
The gondolier had stopped singing. Perhaps he felt that with his barcarole he had brought about what was required of him – not that, from his perch astern, he could do more than divine the conduct of his encapsulated clients. The gondola carried a little lantern; so did others on the water; the general effect was of a slow-motion nature film dealing with the lifecycle of the firefly. Behind Gloria was a little window embellished with unnecessary curtains smelling of salt water and dust; through it she could see the outline of their private corsair dimly against a phosphorescent wake. They were now being heaved or spooned or waggled – for the motion of the oar was an extraordinarily subtle one – back towards the Piazzetta. There was still a cluster of lights there, but much of Venice had gone dark. On their left the island of San Giorgio Maggiore showed in silhouette against a luminous southern sky; directly above its campanile, as if at the tip of an invisible mast, hung a single star. Gloria felt disoriented. She tried, quite without success, to remember what had put this entire Italian journey in her head. She recalled, as a comforting circumstance, the small number of hours separating her by jet from Heathrow, the East End of London, and the new job she would presently be taking up there.
It was thus that the water party ended in an atmosphere of some constraint. Neither Kirstie nor Octavius appeared to have taken satisfaction in whatever had passed between them. Octavius paid the bill briefly and without airing his Italian to the corsair at all. And as the corsair parted from them without cordiality it looked as if Octavius had even allowed his sense of displeasure to reflect itself, most unjustly, in the size of the mancia. They could easily have been put down at the Punta della Salute. But Octavius hadn’t thought of it, so they tramped through devious and deserted calli and salizzade to the Ponte dell’Accademia. Octavius tried to enliven their progress by explaining that, although gondolas are of enormous and even mysterious antiquity, the recognised way of moving about Venice used to be on horseback. But the young women – themselves unjustly, this time – supposed this to be a feeble joke, and Octavius sulked for several hundred yards as a result. They reached the Zattere, passed the Gesuati (from the façade of which they might have reflected that there gestured at them statues of Prudence, Justice, Strength and Temperance), and so reached their twinned boarding-houses. They paused outside for a few moments to assure one another that it had all been great fun – just as if they were forty-year-olds at the end of a party that hadn’t quite come off. Gloria found this the evening’s most depressing moment. But not being, in fact, forty-year-olds, she and Kirstie weren’t glum for long. They had regained their normal good spirits – or something very like them – by the time they got up to their room.
‘You can have first bath,’ Gloria said obligingly, and sank down on a bed which stood up to her very well. She added at once: ‘Was that young man making passes at you, or was I tricked by moonlight?’
‘Yes, I suppose he was. He must have felt it to be the thing – when in a gondola like that.’
‘Perhaps he felt that you felt it to be the thing – when in a gondola like that. The gondola was your idea, my girl.’
‘So it was.’ Kirstie had gone into the bathroom and was turning on taps. ‘But he couldn’t,’ she called back, ‘have felt I felt anything of the kind. Because I didn’t.’
‘He must have got a false impression. I think he’s much too sensitive to have any notion of making what he could feel might be unwelcome advances.’
‘Do you, now?’ Kirstie appeared again, and began peeling off her clothes. ‘What I feel is that he gets things out of books.’
‘Out of books?’ It was clear to Gloria that this had been offered as an adverse judgement upon Octavius Chevalley; and she had an instant, if odd, impulse to defend him. ‘He’s certainly not an ignorant gnome, like you and me.’ Gloria had a certain weakness for picking up passing slang. ‘But just what has he been getting out of books this time?’
‘I don’t feel I quite know.’
‘We’re both doing a hell of a lot of feeling.’
‘Then let’s unfeel. No p. m.’
‘Very well.’ Gloria had to agree at once that no postmortem would be held. ‘And you just hurry up.’
Kirstie disappeared again, and splashed. Gloria wrote a couple of postcards, of which one was her third to Harry Carter. The bath gurgled out in the alarming way baths can gurgle out in Italy. When Kirstie returned to the bedroom in her pyjamas she was looking unexpectedly troubled.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘To go back, after all. To recur. To analyse.’
‘Just a minute.’ It was because Gloria too was now inexplicably disturbed that she deferred further conference until she had filled her own bath. She was careful not to fill it too full. This was because of another thing about Italian baths. They can behave badly when an unexpected degree of displacement befalls them. ‘Well,’ she presently demanded, kicking off her shoes, ‘what are you analysing?’
‘I suppose it’s Octavius’s motive in making those eyes at me. It was just eyes, you know. And a kind of mooing and cooing. You heard.’
‘Murmuring would be fairer.’ Gloria’s instinct was again to defend. ‘Still, it was murmuring. I give you that.’ She returned to the bathroom and immersed herself with caution. ‘Come and talk here,’ she said. ‘When I’ve finished I want to go to sleep.’
‘All right. But you do know what’s going on?’ As she fired off this question, Kirstie returned to the bathroom, sat down on the lavatory seat, appeared to judge this inelegant in view of the matter in hand, and instead perched on the end of the bath. ‘It’s one of those sudden holiday things. The young man’s in love with you.’
It was perhaps the seeming extreme inconsequence of Kirstie’s announcement that induced in Gloria what felt like a spasm or contraction round the heart.
‘You’re dotty,’ she said.
‘Or this Chevalley is.’ Kirstie now spoke with a calmness which Gloria recognised with dismay as masking extreme resentment. ‘Or he’s been reading a book about the technique of seduction. In Italian, I don’t doubt.’
‘What a disgusting thing to say!’ Gloria had sat up – like a very Venetian Artemis surprised by Actaeon, or some such
mythological character, when bathing in a secluded silvan spring.
‘He was making you jealous.’
‘He was doing nothing of the sort.’
‘I mean he thought he was. Going by the book.’ Kirstie paused. She might now have been an actress admirably schooled in delivering her lines. ‘Octavius Chevalley is a very oblique young man.’
‘Oblique?’ This unusual word quite grounded Gloria.
‘Or let’s be charitable. A confused young man, if you like.’ Kirstie made one more pause – and then burst, amazingly, into a mysterious Doric. ‘But what I’d call him, Gloria Montacute, is a fair scunner!’
‘Just clear out for a minute.’ Gloria had managed to be calm. ‘Or I shan’t have room to dry.’
To flirt with one young woman by way of stirring up another – Gloria thought, when left alone – is certainly a bookish wile. It probably happens in Jane Austen, and people like that. It’s silly and a bit inferior, but you couldn’t call it infamous. Kirstie, of course, had a right to feel annoyed, if she really felt it was this that had been going on. But why was she so thoroughly angry? It was almost as if she felt that – all into the bad bargain – she’d been merely messed around with; offered not so much what was aimed at someone else as what wasn’t honestly there at all.
But Gloria didn’t go to sleep before she had decided to think poorly of such a speculation. She returned Octavius, so to speak, to Miss Austen’s innocent world. And after that she slept like a heroine with some agreeable destiny before her.
A Palace of Art Page 13