But that was much later.
Going back to earlier years and adopting (as far as one can!) a Proustian outlook of the upper ranks of ‘Society’, and how they comported themselves, one heard of the Anglo-American colony in Venice, residents with beautiful houses. They were completely different from and slightly aghast at the rash of moneyed visitors who invaded Venice after the First World War, a cosmopolitan crowd who thronged the Lido, behaved anyhow in the Piazza, and at a given date—dictated by fashion—departed one and all to an hotel on Lake Como. These rather noisy immigrants were called by the Italians ‘The Settembrini’, and various odd and irregular modes of behaviour were attributed to them.
As it happened this post-war violation of Venice coincided with, though it did not cause, the exit from the city of the older and stabler foreign colony. Some died; some just went away, and these included several distinguished ladies, titled and untitled, who had made Venice their second home, and had there entertained many eminent literary figures, some from foreign countries including Henry James, and also including (last and least) Baron Corvo, who bit the hand that fed and lent him money.
It cannot be supposed that the Italians, to whom Venice belonged, were socially inactive during this time; but they had no tradition of hospitality except possibly between themselves; they accepted hospitality from guest-hungry forestieri, but they didn’t always return it. They had indeed a queen, a social sovereign, who, besides being a famous beauty, and the favourite, it was said, of a King, enjoyed playing bridge more than entertaining the bridge-players to dinner.
The Anglo-American colony, though now sadly diminished in strength and numbers and money, closed their ranks and were still the only section of the Venetian community who said to their friends—Venetians or foreign—‘Will you come and have tea with me?’
Now Mr. and Mrs. Carteret, in their narrow and narrowing orbit, reigned supreme.
They had come to Venice in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Why they had taken this step of expatriation I do not know.
He was an American from New England, whose original name was Carter; she was a Jewess called Hannah Filkenstein from New York, whose family (they were bankers) was, it was said—and this was confirmed by many people who didn’t like her—the first Jewish family to be received in the best New York society. She was one of the 400; ‘I should not be here,’ she said once, ‘if it wasn’t from having some holes and corners in New York.’
How James Carteret and Hannah Filkenstein ever met was never explained, still less why they married. It was said, of course, that he married her for her money; but he had money of his own. He was a small, rather chétif-looking man with a moustache (his wife once said to me ‘No man can afford to be without a moustache’); he had a nervous manner and a high-pitched laugh. ‘Oh don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,’ he used to say, after any remark made by him or anyone else which had the faintest element of humour in it—as though the effort to laugh was more than he could bear.
He was a petit maître, literally and figuratively. He had exquisite taste and a talent as a painter in the style of Sargent. This he abandoned when he married. If his friends reproached him he would say, ‘I gave up painting when I began to mingle with the rich and great.’
His wife had not his talents, but she was a very cultivated woman who spoke French and Italian (and probably German) rather slowly, as she always spoke, but quite correctly, and who read a great deal, though she would not always admit to this.
Together they occupied the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo; not a typical Venetian palazzo, but with the most beautiful view in Venice, and perhaps in the world; for being on the north side it overlooked the inward curve of the Fondamenta Nuove, on the Laguna Morta; and further to the left on the cemetery of San Michele (too beautiful to be thought of as a cemetery) and then towards Murano and Burrano. Those who had eyes to see could see what Guardi, one of whose favourite subjects it was, had seen.
But the view was not the only beauty of the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo. It had its garden. There are few gardens in Venice and this had a rival on the Giudecca; but it is, or was, the most beautiful. It was designed by Palladio or Sansovino, I forget which, and ran down a couple of hundred yards, with the lagoon lapping it, until it was outflanked by a dusty-red building on the right-hand corner. ‘The Casino degli Spiriti’ it was called. It was said to be haunted, hence the name; it was also said to have been Titian’s studio, but no one was ever asked to go inside it. Some said it was empty and there was nothing to see.
But the greatest of the many beauties which emanated from the palace and to which, so to speak, it held the key, the enchantments over which it waved its wand, was the palace itself. Not outside; it was not a typical Venetian palace, towering upwards within a riot of ornament and embellishment; outside it was low and plain and unadorned, and might have been mistaken for a warehouse or even a workhouse. Oh, how different now from its former aspect! ‘C’erano tante famiglie, tante, tante,’ my gondolier used to say, occupying the palace before Mr. Carteret came and turned them out. Seeing its possibilities he took it over and transformed it into the vision of beauty it afterwards became.
My gondolier was obviously in sympathy with the ‘tantissime famiglie’ who had been evicted by the Carterets; but nothing succeeds like success, and many Italians, high and low, cannot resist its allure. The Carterets had made their will prevail, and others less fortunate than they (such is Fate, and the Italians have a great regard for Fate) must fend for themselves.
And so it came about that the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo, which had been occupied by tantissime famiglie, in indescribable squalor, was now occupied by two persons with a suitable number of retainers, in great grandeur. The moment one was admitted by the butler (who was also the Carterets’ first gondolier, but so transformed by his black clothes that no one who didn’t know would have recognized him) everything changed. He might have been admitting the guest into a church, so solemn and reverential was his demeanour as he walked rather slowly up the unimpressive staircase, keeping to the right, and treading softly as though on holy ground.
But when the door of the ante-room was opened, what a change! What a vision of beauty, subdued, protected from the vulgar encroachments of the sunshine by ruched honey-coloured blinds, drawn half-way down. And from the midst of this luminous twilight would appear Mrs. Carteret wearing, as often as not, the broad-brimmed straw hat which cast a shadow over the upper part of her face.
‘Oh, it is you!’ she would exclaim, with a faint air of surprise. ‘I hardly expected you, but here you are!’ (The element of surprise was never quite absent from her manner.) ‘I was afraid some other engagement might have kept you, as it did once before, do you remember?’ The embarrassed guest tried to remember an occasion when he had let down Mrs. Carteret, but couldn’t, and at that moment Mr. Carteret, who had been somewhere in the shadows eclipsed by the ample form and wide-spreading hat of Mrs. Carteret, came to his rescue.
‘We are so glad to see you,’ he said, with the beginnings of a titter that seldom left his lips. ‘Venice is quite a desert now since the dear Hohenlohes, and Lady Malcolm and Mrs. Frontisham died or went away—so we have found no one to meet you, alas!’ And in the minutes following five more guests were ushered in, all with the most resounding names.
They looked about them—it was impossible not to, so great was the prestige with which the Carterets had contrived to invest their house—and then they followed Mrs. Carteret and her pale-blue silk fichu (meant for the cold or the heat?) into the dining-room, but not before aperitifs had been offered. These, though exiguous, were quite delicious, and I once asked Mr. Carteret what was the recipe. He hesitated long enough for me to feel I had made a gaffe, and then said, ‘Please don’t mind, but I think people might . . . might talk if two Englishmen in Venice served the same cocktail. Oh don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!’
With that and the cocktail I had to be content, although Mr. Carteret w
as only a recent Englishman, having changed his nationality for reasons best known to him, and his wife had followed suit.
All the rooms in the house were low by Venetian standards but the Carterets’ dining-room had a ceiling by Tiepolo which one could not help looking at, so near was it to one’s head. It depicted the glorification of someone—perhaps a prevision of Mrs. Carteret?—with angels, saints and putti assisting at the apotheosis.
Mrs. Carteret did not like the ceiling to be remarked on, but equally she did not like it not to be remarked on. With her, it was always difficult to get things right.
Course followed course; the cooking was excellent, the service beyond praise. At the end Mrs. Carteret might say, ‘I’m afraid we have had a rather frugal meal—the cook is ill, as she sometimes is—so tiresome—so we have to rely on the kitchen-maid.’
No, it may have been a perhaps perverted and unrealizable wish on the part of Anna (née Hannah) to keep up standards, of whatever sort, that made her look so critically on the outside world. From her ivory tower she could afford, in every sense of the word, to do so. So-and-so was common (a word she was not afraid to use), so-and-so was stupid, so-and-so was ugly, so-and-so could not speak French and above all, so-and-so had no introduction to her.
Anathema! Away with them, and leave the world clearer for Carteret standards to prevail. In the provincial city of Venice (though she did not regard it as such) it was easier to make her considerable weight felt than in the capitals of Europe. So when a well-known couple, whose relationship was irregular, but who had a letter of introduction to her, asked what day would be convenient to call, she replied ‘No day would be convenient.’
Snubs to you, and snubs all round, except to a few individuals who satisfied Mrs. Carteret’s exacting conception of what is comme il faut, and even they were liable to fall from grace. I remember an instance. A friend who had every qualification for enjoying Mrs. Carteret’s esteem appeared at dinner in a slightly décolleté dress (it wouldn’t have seemed so now) and Mrs. Carteret, a storm on the rugged terrain of her features, rose and asked the guest to put on a shawl. She was not received again, even if she had wanted to be.
Receive, receive!
She herself had been received first into the Jewish Church, then into the Anglican Church, then into the Roman Catholic Church. What a number of receptions, each inflating her ego. No more receptions were in sight, except from the Pope.
Meanwhile her rôle was to make reception, as far as she was concerned, a stumbling-block.
‘Procul O procul este, profani!’
The profane vulgar must be kept away, they would never climb the heights, or go through the initiations, that she had.
*
She rose to her feet, a rather formidable escalation, very unlike Venus rising from the waves, and supported by her husband’s fragile arm, said, ‘We will have coffee in the drawing-room.’
The drawing-room was well worth waiting for; it was the most beautiful room in the house and some might have said the most beautiful room in Venice. It stretched the whole breadth of the building and looked out, on one side, on the long crescent curve of the Fondamenta Nuove, with the slender campanile of San Francesco della Vigna dividing it; and on the other side, the Laguna Morta, with the sad but exquisite cemetery of San Michele, and Murano and Burrano somewhere behind it.
‘You mustn’t let your coffee get cold,’ Mrs. Carteret would say as her guests pressed their noses against the windows.
Thereupon they turned back into the room itself, which was painted or stuccoed in an indescribable shade of blue, at once dark and light, the changeful blue of the Italian skies, a perfect background for the tapestries and Chinese screens on the walls.
Sometimes Mrs. Carteret would say, when coffee and liqueurs were over, ‘Would you like to take a stroll in the garden?’ much as God might have said it of Eden, and the guests, already bemused by the heady qualities of the house, would follow her down the few steps that led to the garden, Mrs. Carteret preceding them, with careful footsteps. Dressed in beige, or some light colour with a tinge of pink in it (for in spite of her bulk she preferred light colours) she would lead the way, and someone said of her, a quotation I have never been able to trace, ‘She hath a monstrous beauty, like the hind-quarters of an elephant.’
When we reached the fountain (Sansovino? Palladio?) which was the centre of the garden, she might say,
‘I don’t expect you want to go any further. Further on you can see the usual mixture of sandole and bragozze, fishermen plying their trade. I don’t think they’re very interesting.’ And sometimes she would add, “We have a gardener, but there aren’t many flowers in the garden. Italians are not flower-minded. If you point to a rose and ask them what it is, they will say “É un fiore”—“it’s a flower”—but they don’t get any further than that.’
By then it was clearly time to go, although luncheon in Italy, with its aftermath, drags on for at least two hours before it is polite to leave.
*
How the Carterets acquired the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo I never knew. It must have been at some time when houses in Venice were cheaper than they are now. Also, it was far off the beaten track; from where I stayed, on the other side of Venice, the sunny side, it needed half an hour on foot or in gondola to get there.
James Carteret, I am sure, espied its possibilities; his was the artist’s eye; and its connection with the Contarini family, to whom it had once belonged, no doubt endeared it to him. The Contarinis, after having seven Doges to their name, against the Mocenigos’ six, were now extinct. Their last surviving member, at a party, claimed the privilege of going in last. ‘All Venice,’ he said, ‘is my house.’
The Carterets were nothing if not snobs—he a genealogical snob, and she a social one. His name had originally been Carter, of an esteemed New England family. He did not think it imposing enough and when he came to Venice he added the ‘et’ that turned it to Carteret, the name of a distinguished English statesman. As time passed he persuaded himself and tried to persuade others that he was collaterally descended from the Carterets, and had only omitted the ‘et’ in deference to New England democratic feeling. The Anglo-American colony, or what remained of it, and some of the Italians, who were in touch with it, made jokes about this—’Carter-et-, et quoi?’ or ‘Carter-et cetera, et cetera.’ His wife, who had been Hannah Filkenstein, followed suit by changing her first name to Anna. This too aroused ribald jokes in the select circles of Venice.
‘My dear, have you taken to dropping your h’s? You mean Hannah, not Anna.’
But none of these pinpricks pierced the Carterets, who were far too secure with their money and the beauty that they had bought and made for themselves, and that lay within and around them, and with the visitors to Venice who came with introductions and were received by Anna Carteret with varying degrees of welcome. I should never have been received in those hallowed precincts, but for my travelling companion, who had an introduction to her and who bore a well-known name, as a result of which a visiting-card inscribed in the most beautiful copper-plate, ‘Mr. James Carteret’, invited us both in an almost illegible handwriting, to lunch. We seemed to pass the test, at least he did, and when after some years he ceased to be a frequent visitor to Venice, Mrs. Carteret did not withdraw her favour (not her favours) from me, except on certain occasions.
I had formed the habit of lunching in my gondola in the lagoon—a picnic lunch—but it was delightful, and being young then, or comparatively young, I hated to forgo it. Mrs. Carteret, being old or comparatively old, much preferred having guests to lunch than to dinner. ‘À mon âge,’ she used to say, for the French language had then the chic which ours has not, ‘I would rather lunch than dine,’ and it is still a grief to me that I would not always fall in with her wishes. What did it matter, sacrificing a lunch on the lagoon by some dreary uninhabited island, when I could have had it with her and her guests (‘no one to speak of’) to the music of the plashing of the Palladio f
ountain? For she, like me, was fond of lunching out-of-doors, and the food appeared as though by magic still hot from the inside of the house.
But I did not always refuse these invitations to lunch, which were after all most acceptable and accompanied by amenities of company, food and service that I could never have provided for myself. But still I was unwilling to forgo my daily stint on the lagoon, on which I imagined my physical and mental health depended. During these exertions I worked up a tremendous sweat, and having been warned by my mother that it was dangerous to sit (possibly in a draught) in sweat-soaked clothes—when I was bidden to lunch with Mrs. Carteret I used to take a supply of dry garments, and ask if I might change in the gondoliers’ room.
‘But what do you do there?’ she would ask, having given me permission. ‘Wouldn’t you rather go upstairs and be more comfortable in a bathroom?’
It was a pertinent question, for nothing could be less like the inside of the palazzo, designed for show, than the gondoliers’ room, designed (if designed at all) for use. My plan was really easier and in the end she gave way to it.
In one corner there was a small wash-basin which did not admit hot water, where the two gondoliers presumably refreshed their bodies after their labours at the oar, before they presented themselves as model men-servants in the chambers above. A slight smell of what? of unwashed bodies—lingered around, for the gondoliers, and who could blame them?—did not always have the time or the inclination to transform themselves, skin-high, from their aquatic to their domestic roles. Some guests (of whom I was not one) remarked maliciously of an effluvium of perspiration; but then Venice is so full of smells.
The gondoliers’ room was not meant to be seen by the guests at the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo. Indeed it is doubtful if Mr. and Mrs. Carteret had ever seen it. It was, as far as it was anything, severely utilitarian. There were some ash-trays here and there, perhaps with the name of the hotel they came from on them, and some coat-hangers ditto, on which the gondoliers hung their walking-out clothes. There were a couple of stiff-backed chairs, not affording much relaxation to a tired man, a table or two and the remains of a carpet, which may have been in the palazzo before the Carterets bought it.
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 79