“I think we should go, Johnnie. I really do. I’m tired. I’d like to rest.”
“I thought you were rested. I want to stay. I want to look. It’s my wife.”
The other two had noticed them.
She whispered urgently, “It’s not your wife.” She tried to drag him away, but he was bigger than she, immovable.
“Johnnie, let’s go,” she commanded, raising her voice.
He scowled and abruptly walked away across the gallery ahead of her.
On the way back to the hotel, he was silent, his mouth clamped shut. He didn’t look at her, his eyes were fixed ahead. She’d never seen him angry. It was new and startling.
“Johnnie, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
She was afraid to speak.
When they reached the appartement, he sat down at the dining table and stared out the window, biting his nails.
“I’m going in to rest awhile,” she said. He ignored her.
She went into her own room. It was quiet outside, all of Venice was cast into an afternoon torpor.
Suddenly, she felt the twinging sensation in her left side. She touched herself there. Please, no. She couldn’t survive it. What would she do if she had an attack here? Her doctor, Sir James Paget, was so far away across the sea. There were no good doctors in this foreign place.
She rinsed a flannel in cold water, lay down on the bed, and pressed it to her head. There was a foul, bitter taste in her mouth. She prayed, Please don’t let it happen. Not now. Relax, every part …
He’d never spoken angrily to her before. And she hadn’t had to raise her voice in years. She almost never exchanged cross words with anyone. No one ever challenged her. People were afraid of her. George had shielded her, babied her. For so many years, she’d been a loved woman, by George, by Charley, by all their friends and her admirers and followers. With all the fame, she thought, she’d become spoiled, everyone around her trying to anticipate her needs, everyone in awe of The Great Talent. That was the price of celebrity, she knew.
No one told you the truth.
Chapter 5
After a brief nap she felt better. The sensation in her side had abated.
They were going to a concert at the Teatro Malibran. It was to be the highlight of their stay.
She began to get ready. She put on the green silk dress she’d bought at Madame La France’s in Battle Square just for this occasion and spread powder on her face. It gave her skin a thick, flat color, but it was better than having her naked wrinkles visible to the world. She dabbed on the Parfum Violette Johnnie had given her as a gift in Paris, and draped the mantilla over her head and shoulders.
She drew on her long, white kid gloves, took her gold lace fan with the mother-of-pearl handle from its silk-lined box, straightened her shoulders, and prepared to go out into the sala. At the bedroom door, she hesitated. What would she find?
She pushed open the double doors.
There he was, standing tall in the middle of the room, waiting for her, dressed in full evening regalia, black morning coat, black silk foulard, pearl stickpin, holding his top hat.
“Bella, bella,” he said. He smiled broadly. “You look lovely. The dress is lovely.”
For a moment, she believed him. Perhaps the dress made him see her in a new way.
They descended the stairs to the lobby, he smiling proudly with her on his arm, and she, queenly, almost pretty.
The gondolier, Corradini, was there on the riva. She noticed again his pale blue eyes. They stood out against his tanned and oiled skin, his seamed face and sinewy arms. Again she noticed that his costume fit him too tightly. He was trying to look younger, showing off his body.
Once they were seated, he pulled the boat efficiently away from shore, working easily, unsmilingly, saying nothing, distant and skilled, his skin weathered by years in the sun rowing tourists around.
It was early evening, the night beginning. As they passed along the banks of the canal, the gaslights glowed, and the riva was filled with tourists out in all their finery for their evening promenade.
She gave Johnnie a little lecture on Vivaldi to prepare him for the concert. “He wrote The Four Seasons in Mantua at the court of Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt. There are four cantos representing each of the four seasons, sonnets that go with them which Vivaldi probably wrote himself —”
In the middle of her explanation, he bent forward, took her hands exuberantly between his own, and kissed them through her gloves. Then he squeezed them so tightly her knuckles ground together.
“Ouch! You hurt me!” She winced and pulled her hands away.
“Sorry. I’m too enthusiastic, I’m afraid,” he said, patting them.
She flexed her fingers. “You’ve got a powerful grip.”
He sat back in the gondola, smiling in anticipation of the concert.
The gondolier curved to the right and made his way through the maze of canals. The buildings loomed close together, a crack of dark blue sky just visible between the rooftops.
They came to a stop, and Johnnie told Corradini to wait for them. The man nodded, once again, she noted, just verging on rudeness.
Making their way along a dark calle, they came upon the Corte Sabbionera and the tiny, jewel-like Teatro Malibran, its warm lights beaming from the windows and the door, the concertgoers assembled on the campo waiting to go in.
Inside, everything was trimmed with gold. The boxes were held up by caryatids, the parapets decorated with crowns. There were two men already in their box, one older and gray-haired, the other much younger, clean-shaven, perhaps his son.
She scanned the program. The rustling around them quieted, and the curtain lifted to reveal the musicians and the conductor. The conductor lifted his arms, the musicians lifted their instruments, and the heraldic notes of “Spring” sounded. Immediately, the tight notes of the first violin, playing the allegro, possessed her. Then the other instruments joined in. In the excitement of the music, she forgot everything — Johnnie sitting beside her, the theater around her. There was the sweet call of a single violin, a spring bird, rising then calming into a diminuendo. The goatherd dozing on the meadow, an intimation of love to come; nymphs and shepherds dancing. It flowed through her body, lifted her.
And now, “Summer.” In the last movement of the “Summer” concerto, the presto, the storm came. She noticed Johnnie moving from side to side in his seat, his torso quivering and shaking like the rain itself as the violins reached their peak, the thunder and lightning split the heavens, and hail rained down. Next to her, she heard a droning sound. He was humming. She glanced over at the men in the box to see if they’d heard him, but they were sitting at an angle slightly in front of them, absorbed in the concert.
She leaned over and pinched his arm. He looked at her sideways and grinned, lurching and swaying to the music with a strange, rigid posture. “Johnnie …”
He began lifting each shoulder one by one — left, right, left, jerkily, like a tin soldier, a mad puppet. “What?” he asked innocently, his eyes fixed on her as if daring her to stop him.
She inclined her head toward their neighbors in the box and whispered, “You’re disturbing them.”
He looked at them. “I love the music, that’s all.” He laughed. “What’s wrong with that?”
He shifted back toward the stage and continued, shoulder up, down, up, with no relation to the music now at all.
She could no longer pay attention to the concert.
With the fierce, final drama of “Winter,” he swayed, eyes glowing, rotating his body in a circular motion.
Then, thank God, it was over. He gave a final shiver.
The applause began, spreading out and lingering in the air of the hall. She stood up and smiled anxiously at the men in the box. The older one nodded at her. She wondered if he recognized her. She prayed to God, no — then hurried ahead of Johnnie to exit before the crowd.
Outside, on the campo, Johnnie was still smiling
euphorically. She led the way back to the boat, he droning out of tune, lingering behind her, his attention wandering. A dog skulked along the edges of the calle. “Look,” he said. “See, the window.” Above them were geraniums in a box. Two women walked past, black shawls covering bent heads.
At the end of the calle, the gondola bobbed in the shadows. The gondolier, Corradini, was standing by it. As they approached, he scrutinized them with cold eyes.
“To the hotel,” Johnnie ordered.
As the boat made its way slowly along the narrow rio, Johnnie still hummed, loudly, an approximation of the music from the concert. She sat in the gondola as if she were alone.
She noticed that the boatman kept glancing at Johnnie, with a calculating look on his face.
They reached the Grand Canal and in a few minutes they were at the hotel.
Johnnie stood up to get out and she saw the gondolier look directly at him, then boldly up and down his body. The man seemed to take in every part of him, his lips curled in a faint, mocking smile.
“Forse potrei mostrarvi alcuni luoghi?” he asked. “Conosco un posto vicino al Rialto.” Would Johnnie like to go out again this evening? he was saying. He was offering to take him to a place near the Rialto.
Johnnie glared at him. “Non mi interessa!” he barked. “My wife and I are retiring for the evening now.”
The gondolier shrugged and smiled again. He reached out to Johnnie to help him onto shore, but Johnnie wrenched away from him.
As they walked to the hotel entrance, she glanced behind her. The horrible gondolier was standing there by the boat, his eyes fixed on Johnnie, a strange, knowing half-smile on his face.
“Why did he want you to go with him at this time of night?”
“They just want to take you somewhere and then get more money out of you.”
“You were very harsh with him.”
“It was very irritating,” he said.
Inside the appartement, he removed his jacket, folded it, and laid it over the chair. Still scowling, he untied his cravat and unbuttoned the neck of his shirt.
She waited, then said, “I think I’ll go to bed now.”
“I’ll stay up a bit,” he said. “If I go to bed now, I won’t sleep.”
“I can’t bear to see you suffer,” she said.
He didn’t answer but walked out onto the balcony. She came up behind him.
But there was nothing more coming from him. He was waiting for her to leave.
“Well, then,” she said, “good night.” He remembered to kiss her on both cheeks. But before she could step away, he’d gone back to watching the water below, swaying and black and glittering.
In her room, the bed had been turned down, the carafe of orange water set down beside it. The maid had done it before she left for the evening.
She began to undress. With difficulty, she reached around and tried to unhook her gown — it was nearly impossible. There was no one to ask for help. Always before, George would have done it, or Brett, the maid. She struggled, twisted her body around, and at last managed to undo the dress. She removed her corset and petticoat and unrolled her stockings.
Putting on the nightgown, she lay down on the bed on top of the covers. She thought about the events at the concert, the way his body had become so rigid, his strange humming. And his anger at the gondolier? The man was only asking if he’d like to go out again.
At first, he’d noticed her new dress, her effort to look attractive for him, but then she seemed to vanish for him, and he’d gone tensely into himself.
The nightgown stuck to her flesh. There was a faint stirring of air from the window, a moment of relief from the heat. She felt a coolness on her arms and thighs, between her breasts and on her stomach.
“I will accept whatever terms you want,” he’d said at the beginning. “However you wish it to be between us …” There had only been her fear, her shyness. And his eagerness to marry her.
She wondered again, had he loved another woman before her? He swore that she was the only woman he’d ever loved. But his answers to all such questions were sparse, he volunteered nothing. He’d look into her eyes and smile, telling her without words that she mustn’t ask anymore. He’d never spoken of other women, though he’d talked about the years when he was a young man living in New York with his brother, all the parties and the social life. Had he ever made love before to anyone? This was a question that she’d never dared ask him, even in the intimacy of marriage. In some way, she realized, she didn’t want to know the answer. He was such a fine-looking man, it was impossible to believe that … to believe that he’d been celibate all those years. She knew that young men went to certain women before they married. It was understood. But if he hadn’t gone to those women, if he had never had any relationship with a woman, then what did that mean? Did that mean there was something wrong with him? That he wasn’t … “natural”? He’d been silent about all that. The “terms” of their marriage … there’d been no understanding between them as to whether the terms were mutable, whether they could change.
As she lay there in the heat, the perspiration smoothed her skin, softened the dryness of age, made it feel youthful again. Gradually, the quiet and the breeze calmed her and the events of the concert faded from her mind. She was here in this magnificent and sensual city, in this palace.
And she remembered being young, the summer night, outside in the darkness the sound of crickets and cicadas, the desire to be touched. Here in the humid Venetian night those feelings that she’d almost forgotten were revived, feelings that had been taken from her by the long months of George’s illness, by the urgency of caring for him, by the blow of his death, and by her own age, exhaustion, and illness.
Within this body, there’d once been such a need for love. Before George, the men to whom she’d revealed that pent-up yearning had been so surprised to discover it.
PART II
In a Dark Wood
Chapter 6
Charles Bray was the first. She was twenty-one when she and her father moved to Coventry. She’d been torn by the roots from everything she’d ever known. Isaac was married, Chrissey too.
Her father had taken a lease on a new house, Bird Grove, on Foleshill Road. It was white stucco, semidetached, on a hill above the squalor of Coventry, set amongst fields and meadows. “This lease will send me to the poorhouse,” he said, “but if we’re to find you a husband, it’s best you be in a real town, in society.” He didn’t say it, but she knew what he meant. Until she married, he’d have to support her. Till then, at least he’d have his spinster daughter to take care of him.
As she walked about the house with its strange walls, she felt as if the boundaries of her selfhood had somehow melted, as if she no longer knew who she was. From her bedroom she could see the three spires of the city, the factories in the distance, and the tortured little cottages of the slums. Going to market, she saw groups of children streaming in through the gates of the ribbon factories, some but five or six years old, their breath steaming in the cold, carrying their little lunch pails. They worked as winders. Outside the almshouses there were long lines of women in ragged clothes, babies at their breasts, stomping their feet in the freezing air, queuing for bread. All those poor souls coming to the city from the countryside hoping for work. “The prevalence of misery and want in this boasted nation of prosperity and glory is appalling,” she wrote to Maria Lewis, her old teacher at Miss Wallington’s school. Maria had taken a position as a governess in a clergyman’s family in Northamptonshire. They still corresponded, but Marian felt increasingly distant from her. Maria could not possibly know her world now, the books and learning she had taught herself. She’d gone so far beyond that sad little girl that Maria had taken in her arms at Mrs. Wallington’s.
The people of Coventry were cold and unfriendly. The only acquaintances they had were their next-door neighbors, Abijah and Elizabeth Pears, whom her father knew from conducting business in Coventry for the Arbury Estate. The
Pearses were pious Evangelists. Marian and Elizabeth became friends. Elizabeth was impressed by all the books Marian had read. They discussed the shocking conditions in the city and decided to found a clothing club for the miners’ families.
Elizabeth came from a family of ribbon manufacturers; her brother, Charles, ran the business, C. Bray & Co., and he and his wife, Cara, lived at the top of Radford Road. “They have all sorts of strange types visiting there,” Elizabeth told Marian. “Rather disreputable sorts, I’m afraid, freethinkers, reformers, writers. Perhaps if I introduce you, you’ll have a good influence on them.”
So, one brisk November day, Elizabeth led her across the fields and along the canal to visit her brother and sister-in-law. Marian was nervous at the prospect of meeting these vaguely “dangerous” people, these supposed “radicals.” She was afraid she’d fail completely in the company of such exotic types, that they’d find her dull and provincial.
They came to a Georgian mansion, Rosehill, surrounded by acres of grounds.
Elizabeth’s brother, Charles, was at the front door to greet them. “Come in! Come in!” he cried. Charles seemed like a force of nature, with ruddy cheeks, a full, sensual mouth, unruly hair, a sturdy body. Behind him stood his wife, Cara, a tiny, pretty, gentle creature, with a vague sadness about her, Marian thought. She looked like a doll, with round blue eyes, lovely, long, blond ringlets around her face, and sloping shoulders.
Marian sat on the ottoman in the drawing room by the French window and Charles pulled a chair up next to her. He looked down at her intently.
“My sister, Elizabeth, says you are a most extraordinary young woman. She says you’ve read everything.”
“I don’t know about that,” Marian said.
“Well, have you read Emerson’s essays?”
“I have,” she said.
“Have you read Sartor Resartus?”
“Of course.”
“What about my brother-in-law Charles Hennell’s book, An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity?”
The Honeymoon Page 6