A Palace of Art

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE BAD CONSCIENCE OF

  OCTAVIUS CHEVALLEY

  Octavius Chevalley rose early, and with difficulty conquered gloom sufficiently to order his breakfast. The rolls hadn’t arrived, and he had to distribute his two pats of butter over some rusks which must surely have been manufactured for the purpose of promoting teething in the very young. He scarcely noticed, for he was feeling bad.

  He went out and prowled the slowly awakening city. Women were splashing water on walls and pavements – here in Venice just as they would be doing in Holland. World-over, the presence of canals must encourage such domestic lustrations. He gravitated towards the Piazza San Marco – one always does when wandering aimlessly – and surveyed it sadly. A few wretched old men – the lowest form, he supposed, of Venetian servile life – were swabbing down the café tables. The pigeons, being more privileged creatures, weren’t yet on duty. The Basilica looked gimcrack and absurd; it might have been run up for some ephemeral purpose by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The campanile was much more substantial. He crossed over to it; was mysteriously appalled by his own ant-like presence at the root of its raw red upward thrust; turned away, and hurried down to the Molo. Although the dull green waters he now surveyed constituted the theatre of his late ineptitude he sat for a long time on the chilly steps of St Theodore’s column and stared at them. His dim idea was to make an honest attempt at sorting himself out.

  He remembered a novel – for he was very much the bookish young man of Miss Anderson’s penetrating regard – in which somebody not unlike himself had arrived in Venice with designs upon a great heiress. The heiress hadn’t been at all like Gloria Montacute. But had he himself, nevertheless, really been nursing a plan like that? He didn’t know. It was all very mixed up.

  He looked at his watch, and to his surprise saw that it was half past nine. This meant that refuges were open to him. He got up, found his way to the Ponte dei Greci, and was soon standing before the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. It was a grand name for a very modest building, but not too grand for what lay inside. He’d brought Gloria and that other girl here, so it held uncomfortable associations. But he went straight in – absent-mindedly paying a fee, although in his pocket he had a ticket admitting him to the whole lot. And now he was at home.

  For we here arrive at the underlying fact, the simple, fond, not (at the start) dishonourable truth about Octavius. Venice went to his head – and also to his heart and intellect. Venice was the sole originating occasion (a recording angel would have pronounced) of his being in Venice now. He’d jumped at something that would get him here: something not too beautiful, yet not positively sinful in terms of this imperfect world. Comberback and Domberg were giving him leave of absence for his trip; they were even putting up the money for it; and in return he was to make himself agreeable and persuasive to a possible client. Looked at now, it seemed a pretty shabby notion, anyway – chumming up with the owner of the Nudd collection in the interest of a sale. And – fatally – it had put another idea in his head, or nourished there what had been no more than a casual fantasy foreign to his nature. So from one sort of fake – it was the truth he now confronted – he’d become a deeper fake still.

  Octavius went into the Oratory, where Carpaccio’s pictures are, and for some minutes just wandered around. He had talked a good deal of nonsense about them to the young women, and in his present mood he was even ashamed of that. Carpaccio mightn’t be the very grandest of the Venetians. But he was his, Octavius’s, painter, on whom he’d already published two modest papers. And one ought to be serious about one’s own thing.

  He paused before St Jerome, the lion, and the bolting Dominicans – this chiefly because it was the picture that had most amused Gloria. There were three Turks in the background, which didn’t seem quite right in a monastery, but then Carpaccio got his Turks in everywhere: you could see this identical trio in his early Adoration of the Magi (if it was his) in the National Gallery. Octavius offered himself these reflections in a perfunctory way; he wasn’t, at the moment, really interested in Jerome and his pet; what he had a date with was The Triumph of St George. Standing before this, you could test out your visual memory pretty extensively. There was a preliminary drawing in the Uffizi, and a number of things had happened between that and the painting before him now. An oddly gesturing Saracen borrowed from a woodcut in Breydenbach’s Description of a Journey to the Holy Land had taken Carpaccio’s fancy at first, and in the drawing he had clapped him in directly behind the slain monster. But the Saracen’s arms, oddly cramped in comparison with the free-flowing posture of the Saint, had irritated the composition, so in the painting there was an extra horse instead. But you also had to call up from Reeuwich (who was Breydenbach’s illustrator) the Mosque of Rama, Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, and two Mohammedan women. The Mosque and the Temple came through pretty well intact, but there were other drawings that showed Carpaccio playing around with the women, and one of these had even changed sex in the painting.

  Having thus desperately and ingloriously bolted to his own thing, Octavius was able to finish up before The Vision of St Augustine in a state of very simple aesthetic delectation – not even bothering to reflect on the astounding metamorphosis of the dog as revealed by the drawing in the British Museum. But then he looked at his watch again, and saw that it was nearly eleven o’clock. On two days running he’d met Gloria and Kirstie outside Quadri’s at that hour, so it was reasonable to regard it as a fixed thing. If they were there now, he just mustn’t funk facing up to them. He hurried out of the Scuola in confusion and almost ran through the narrow streets.

  Perhaps, he told himself, there was nothing that couldn’t be retrieved. Perhaps he was exaggerating his last night’s ineptitude: the vulgar notion that he might make Gloria jealous by a little getting off with her companion. But he knew in his heart that it had all been more alien to him than he’d reckoned, and that he’d somehow managed simultaneously to overplay his part and to underplay it, so that he’d just been both offensive and ineffective. Could he apologise to Kirstie? Could he pretend he’d been tight? No – to start making speeches to her would be impossibly heavy-handed. But he’d have to make some sort of speech to Gloria. He’d have to tell her—confess to her—a great deal.

  It was his having conceived a high regard for Gloria – one of those from-afar sentiments, it might have been called – that brought Octavius Chevalley to this good resolution. Like many good resolutions, it was not, perhaps, a good idea.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A TRIP TO TORCELLO

  Gloria was alone, and in front of her on the table stood an espresso. To Octavius’s eye the minute cup, not quite filled with the blackest of black coffee, bore an austere and even forbidding appearance. He realised that he was going to be very easily unnerved.

  ‘Hullo,’ Gloria said, and dropped a lump of sugar into the cup. She could only just have arrived.

  ‘Hullo.’ Octavius tried to take heart from Gloria’s not going in for a formal ‘good morning’. But probably she never did. ‘Where’s Kirstie?’ he asked. As he didn’t much care where Kirstie was, and had no intention of dishonestly continuing to simulate interest in her, he’d perhaps put this question rather too soon. And he’d even asked it with anxiety – although the anxiety was only a kind of spill-over from an adjacent area of his mind.

  ‘You sound quite breathless, Octavius. Have you been running, or something? Do sit down.’

  ‘I thought you might be here.’ Octavius had liked being called Octavius in this normal way. ‘But I was back on Carpaccio, and I’d rather forgotten the time.’

  Gloria nodded – briefly, but with seeming approval. What she was approving of, perhaps, was the general proposition that men should put their work first. Gloria was the superior sort of girl, he told himself, who takes a serious view of life.

  ‘This way of doing coffee,’ Gloria said, ‘you’d think was about right for a cage of canaries. But even a small swig
of it is bracing. You’d better order one.’

  Octavius ordered one, thereby admitting that he needed to be braced.

  ‘Kirstie has broken it up,’ Gloria said casually.

  ‘Broken it up!’ The alarm in Octavius’s voice disconcerted him as he detected it. But it seemed faintly to amuse Gloria.

  ‘Oh, just for the day,’ she said. ‘She has gone on a steamer to a place called Chioggia. The book says it’s the principal fishing port of Italy, and Kirstie said it would do her good to see a spot of honest labour going forward.’

  ‘She’ll do that, all right.’ Here was the theme of work again. Octavius was intelligent enough to be aware that both these young women worked hard themselves, and liked it. And if that’s your disposition, a holiday tends to fold up on you after three or four weeks at most. They’d probably both had about enough of Italy. ‘There’s a kind of second-rate Lido effect nearby, but at Chioggia itself they do land plenty of fish.’

  ‘Is there anything by Carpaccio at Chioggia?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ By this enquiry, which seemed not mischievously intended, Octavius was quite touched. ‘There’s a St Paul in the church of San Domenico. And Kirstie will have a nice trip there.’ His spirits were rising. ‘The boat touches at two islands entirely populated by lunatics. And there’s a third, which your guide book describes as “verdant”, reserved for the extremely aged. You see the bright eyes of the ancient creatures peering out at you through the undergrowth as you sail past.’ Octavius paused, and suddenly decided that this all-is-forgotten note of levity was quite wrong. ‘Gloria!’ he said urgently, ‘I want to—’

  ‘And what are you going to do? Today, I mean.’ Gloria’s tone didn’t acknowledge the slightest consciousness of having interrupted. ‘For it’s rather a gorgeous day.’

  ‘I’d like you to come to Torcello with me.’ To Octavius’s surprised sense, this had uttered itself like an inspiration. ‘It’s just the day for that.’

  ‘What’s Torcello?’

  ‘It’s another island.’

  ‘With lunatics?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s in the other direction.’

  ‘Not where they make you buy lace or glass?’ Gloria plainly felt she had bought enough of these commodities.

  ‘No, no – that’s Murano and Burano. You stop at them, but there’s no need to get off. Not if you’re on the ordinary vaporetto, and not on one of those shocking tourist affairs. And Torcello itself is really very nice.’ Octavius’s vein of inspiration continued. ‘There’s almost nothing there at all.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Gloria was visibly attracted.

  ‘Well, there’s a more or less abandoned cathedral, which is very splendid; and a more or less abandoned little church, which is very beautiful; and there’s a very good restaurant, which won’t be all that crowded at this time of year. And, Gloria, I’d be awfully pleased if you’d come to Torcello with me, and lunch with me there.’

  These were, or seemed to be, accents which it is not for a young woman to mistake. What chiefly struck Gloria – what touched her to an extent she recognised and, somehow, accepted without surprise – was the fact that she was being invited out to lunch. Octavius was poor, and it was useless to pretend she wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t this time talking about going Dutch, all the same. It made the situation serious, but she didn’t think she was afraid of that.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, and waved to the waiter. She would at least pay for her own espresso. ‘When do we go?’

  ‘Oh, we can set off at once.’ Octavius looked happy, but also rather alarmed; he was feeling, she supposed, that some die had been cast. ‘We just walk over to the Fondamente Nuove, and with luck we shan’t have to wait ten minutes.’

  Gloria felt that there would now be a longer wait than that before Octavius came out with what he had to say. He had, she guessed, some particular setting in his head – or perhaps a favourite building or picture or statue from the presence of which he was proposing to draw support in a crisis. That would be extremely like Octavius, she told herself with as much confidence as if she had watched his development from childhood. And how enormously different he was from Harry – and, in a way, how very much more mysterious! She found it perplexing that anybody quite young should go in passionately for art. Of course, she knew that this was only because her mother’s art-loving associates had without exception been elderly and very plainly money-loving as well. All the great painters had themselves been young once: Octavius had explained that Raphael (whom she remembered her mother disapproving of) had done some of his best stuff when of positively tender years. She must revise her ideas. She made a start now by telling herself that Octavius would certainly be the world’s top authority on Carpaccio before he was thirty. And that this was quite something to be.

  These thoughts (which point the sombre fact that loyalty and susceptibility constitute a hazardous combination in a young woman) took Gloria across Venice now. She was glad that Octavius wasn’t rushing anything, because she did very sensibly feel that she had real thinking to do. There were people to whom it would be of no account whatever that Octavius was your only coming oracle on Carpaccio, and there were people to whom it would similarly be of no account whatever that Harry might become your only possible choice as a full back for England. That was one way to put her problem to herself – but of course it could be expressed in other terms. You played for England on the strength of a certain radical masculinity which wasn’t a bit relevant when deciding whether a Sacred Conversation, or a Madonna with Donors, or a Saint Somebody in his Study, was by this artist or that.

  They had paused in what she knew was called a campo, and before an equestrian monument. For a moment she wondered whether this was going to be Octavius’s supporting presence. It was plainly a tremendous thing. And if you wanted radical masculinity, the man on the horse was it.

  ‘Who is he?’ Gloria asked.

  ‘Who is he?’ As he repeated her question, Octavius stared at her much as if, standing on Westminster Bridge, she had uttered some such words as, ‘Please, what river is that?’ But at once he recovered himself. ‘It’s Bartolommeo Colleoni,’ he said, ‘and it’s by Verrocchio. Only he didn’t live to finish it.’

  ‘What was he?’

  ‘Verrocchio?’

  ‘No. Whoever you called him. The man on the horse.’

  ‘I’d say he was pretty well nobody at all. A run-of-the-mill ruffian, or small-time bandit. But the statue just happens to be the greatest thing of its kind in the world. Which is odd, I suppose. But then art can be like that. Verrocchio was told to do Colleoni. But he did an idea instead.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ And Gloria did see. ‘I was thinking,’ she said suddenly, ‘there ought to be riders on those horses on the church. But naked, and not with terrific armour and helmets and all that. Like the ones in the British Museum.’

  ‘Splendid notion.’ If it came into Octavius’s head that this reference to the Elgin Marbles perhaps represented Gloria’s first-ever incursion into the field of comparative criticism, he didn’t betray the fact. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going to look at things much less arrogant.’

  The vaporetto was crowded with country-people. At least they looked like that, although Gloria supposed the islands they were going out to counted as no more than suburbs of this watery city. They pushed past you vigorously, but with polite outcries of ‘Permesso!’ and ‘Scusi!’ such as you wouldn’t get on a London tube. Some were going to the cemetery, and at the cemetery a funeral party was arriving as well. So here was a gondola that really was a Ship of Death: an outsize affair exuberantly adorned but pervasively inky, as if Styx or Acheron, or similar nasty rivers one had been taught about at school, had coated it in their own hue. Over the top of fortresslike walls an army of cypresses, answeringly black, peered curiously at the new arrival. The cemetery island must be so crammed with corpses that it was surprising there was any room for trees. Gloria asked whether it was inhabited, and Octavius s
aid there was a large population of cats.

  Once past Murano, they were out on the lagoon. It had a loneliness that had nothing to do with distance. You could count the planes at the airport on the mainland; and here and there, all the time, you came on little islands with brick buildings crammed on top of them. The buildings didn’t look at all old, but they did look derelict; some of them were blind and blank structures which Octavius – although without giving much impression of authority – declared to have been powder-magazines. The fact of so much being deserted made for melancholy, and so did the unnatural stillness of the water. Torcello, when their wandering course eventually got them there, at first seemed melancholy too, but Gloria took to it at once. The canal and lagoon smells (which in fact she had by now rather taken to as well) were mingled as soon as you landed with something faintly aromatic, which might have come from herb gardens abandoned long ago. Commerce was represented by only one old man, who had a forlorn little stall on the quay. As they were the only voyagers to disembark, he naturally looked at them with expectation, and Octavius pleased Gloria by stopping, holding one of his Italian conversations, and buying a small and gaily enamelled bangle at the substantially reduced price which the right sort of Italian conversation secures. The old man wrapped it up carefully in tissue paper – rather as if (Gloria thought, recalling a stray reminiscence by the well-travelled Guise) he had been a goldsmith on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, with some really high-class jewellery at his command.

  ‘It’s for you,’ Octavius said, and handed her the minute parcel with a subdued flourish which one of Carpaccio’s well-bred young Venetian gallants might have learnt from. That the gift had cost less than a pint of beer or a packet of cigarettes pleased Gloria still further, and she would have unwrapped the bangle and slipped it on at once if she had been quite confident it would clasp over her wrist. ‘Just as many ghosts here as on San Michele,’ Octavius said.