Diana called my name and took out the pocket-book. This, she said, was the place for Swinburne, and the weather was perfect. The snow was falling heavily now, so one could only just perceive the geese on the banks of the lake, and the house, twice as far away, was as good as lost to us. We sat close together, for warmth and fellowship, and I listened as she read.
Suddenly I realize that I am no longer recording events for Mr. Taylor, but for myself. I have the Swinburne book with me now, as I write: not Diana’s hand-copied poems but the published edition, bound in green cloth with gold lettering to the spine, entrusted to me by Diana when we returned to the house. In the temple she read “Dolores”, slowly and with a measured lilt which muffled the world around and drew me to her words.
In the hall near my room there is a painting, titled on its gilt frame as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. All one sees of Icarus are a few feathers drifting down from on high and a pair of legs protruding from a great splash upon the surface of the sea. He has fallen already: his waxen wings are melted, the drop is over. The other denizens of the painting pay him no heed: a sailor climbs the rigging of a galleon in the middle distance; the ploughman plods his weary way along the neat line of a neighbouring furrow; an angler casts his line and watches for a bite; the shepherd waits by his flock and gazes upwards in thought. Icarus is lost, lost to all he knew, lost to the blue which envelops him. And in the temple today, in the blue-white and the moment, I turned and laid my head on Diana’s lap and rested my feet on the arm of the bench, and the snow fell and the words fell and I let my eyelids close. When she whispered, “Like lovers they melted and tingled,” her breath was warm on my ear and I turned my head and met her lips and did not dare open my eyes to see her, not then; not then, when to add anything would be to take something away. Then her hand, removing my hat, and fingers running through my hair, and her voice stronger and more distant as she straightened her back and read on.
“Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe,
Male ringlets or feminine gold,
That thy lips met with under the statue…”
I need write no more to remember the temple.
We walked back, across the clean, white grass in front of the house, with no care to find a path to guide us. Diana told me about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which she had seen in May. Of the sharpshooters, she said she preferred Annie Oakley to Lillian Smith, finding the younger woman “dreadfully déclassée without ever having been classée in the first place.” We had reached the door. Diana kissed me on the cheek—no more than a brush of the lips against my skin—and then we were inside. A new voice—new to me at least—greeted us, causing Diana to rush through the hall, dropping her hat and gloves behind her, with a cry of, “Peter!” I followed, more slowly, wondering what I ought to do with my winter wear until a maid appeared from nowhere and held out her arms to receive coat, scarf, and all.
The brother is, I suppose, handsome. Certainly, he is well mannered and an adequate, if reticent, conversationalist. He has something of the look of his father, with whom he returned this afternoon: well-formed features, in decent proportions, with the slightest heaviness to them, as though worn knowingly as part of the accoutrements of the aristocracy.
I dined with the entirety of the family for the first time since my arrival. Dinner was an enjoyable experience, but I was lost in the remembrances of the day past and glad to retire to my room a little earlier than usual, claiming a weariness born of yesterday’s journey and the exertions of an expedition in the cold weather.
I keep closing my eyes and remembering the sensations of the afternoon: the chill of the snows, the warmth of her lips. Where I had supposed that apprehension would rush in, I find only excitement, as if I were arriving at some mysterious destination and saw ahead only the possibility of wonderful things.
Now there comes a tapping—she is gently rapping at my chamber door—and I must put down my pen.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I sat reading the diary in the warmth of the house, perched on a marble bench just inside a long gallery which ran east from the entrance hall. At the far end I could see a spiral staircase disappear into the room above. The blue leaflet confirmed that I was beneath the library.
I thought of the lock of hair, pressed between the leaves of a guidebook, back at the cottage. It did not belong to Penny. She had been growing ever closer to me, through her diaries and my presence at Barbroke, but she took a step away with the strands in their ribbon and hid herself, just a little. I wondered how the hair had ended up in Taylor’s possession; how he had acquired any of Penelope’s belongings, for that matter.
The house was virtually empty. As far as I could tell I was sharing it with one or two members of staff and nobody else. The marble bench seemed part of the building itself, out of bounds and only to be appreciated at a distance. Yet I was visible to the man who hovered in the entrance hall, keeping watch over the ground floor, and he said nothing to me, and gave no sign that I should stand. So I sat opposite a space once occupied by The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. The statue had long-since been replaced by a photograph of the original: Ludovica, a sixteenth-century nun, lay in Rome, safe in the Church of San Francesco a Ripa. I looked up at the photograph from time to time as I read, recalling the work of the sculptor and wondering how good the Barbroke copy must have been to fool Diana’s ancestor. In all probability it was not particularly accomplished: if great-great-grandfather wanted a Bernini then a Bernini it was.
The kiss in the temple was not the inevitable course of my imagined narrative, but its occurence made me realize that had it never happened I would have felt cheated, a victim of a peculiar Weltschmerz. The Bruegel, however, was an unexpected twist. I had stopped reading when Penny described it to me. The man in the hall knew nothing of the painting. He told me that most of the artwork had been removed during the war and little had been returned; told me that the long gallery held all there was to be seen; and no, the other walls were bare; and no, the private areas were empty or estate offices; and no, there was nobody else who might help. He seemed to resent my caring, as though it threw his own listlessness into the light, gave him his own reasons to hate reality, or caused him to be struck by his own, half-hidden disappointments. I had returned to my spot on the marble bench and he had returned to his coffee.
The Bruegel was interesting because it ought not to have been there. It was bought by the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, in the early twentieth century, where it was later seen by W.H. Auden and woven into one of his poems. But I had never heard of the Fitzpatricks in its provenance, back before it was sold to the Musée by the Sackville Gallery. There is another version of the painting, one which is not by Bruegel, but then, even the Brussels copy may not be by Bruegel. In that other version Icarus’s father, Dædalus, is still in the air, and Penny’s shepherd is not lost in reverie: he is looking at Dædalus amongst the clouds above, watching him fly. So Barbroke had not held that copy, and Penny had seen something else. I made a note to look deeper but not then, when there was so much else to do. Auden’s Bruegel has a small, pale patch of paint at the edge of the ploughman’s field, and it is only when observed closely that it coalesces into the head of what must be a corpse, a body lost in the undergrowth and its meaning lost, too, or given the gift of multiplicity with the passage of time. No plough stops for a dead man. Penny did not mention it, so it was missing or she failed to notice it. Or she knew just what it was but had no place for more death that day.
Whatever the history of her Icarus, Penny had missed the reference that might have been closest to her heart: the words of Bruegel’s inspiration, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the same as had given the world Iphis and Ianthe, the story told and retold before, finally, Warber had his Thomasin and Olivia. In Ovid the audience—the ploughman, the angler, the shepherd—see Icarus as a god, able to travel the sky. In the painting, though, they have not seen him, or do not care, or have turned away as he begins to fall, certain th
ere is little to gain from seeing another human fail to match their deities. Or is it something more? A partridge sits on a branch by the angler, close to the ground as is its way, and relishes the sight of Icarus’s failure, as well it might. Ovid wrote that the bird was once Talus, the apprentice of a jealous Dædalus, thrown from on high by Dædalus himself, saved, turned into a partridge, transformed by Minerva as he fell from her temple. I wished that Penny had seen all the connections. I wished I could tell her.
Ludovica lay still in her photograph, taking no notice of me. Her creator, Bernini, slashed the face of his lover to punish her for sleeping with his brother. He did not do it himself, but sent a servant. Bernini was too busy beating his brother half to death. Constanza Piccolomini, Bernini’s lover, the wife of his assistant, but still using her maiden name: she paid a price for the affair, sent to an institution, scarred, whilst Bernini’s contacts kept him out of trouble. And the bust he had carved of her, of his Constanza—when she was his—kept its beauty. Dorian Gray played in reverse. Diana told Penny the story as they sat, looking at the Ludovica, the one which Bernini might never have seen, the one destroyed during the Second World War, bombed where it rested, away from the troops at the house but not, it turned out, away from the war itself.
The photograph on the wall beside me had been enlarged from a negative which must have been tiny, or damaged, or both. The hard grain and wavering contrast hid the perfection of parted lips, heavy-lidded eyes, grasping hands; the flow and crease of the habit; the undulations of the mattress beneath, as hard and cold, as soft and warm as Bernini’s mattress for the Borghese Hermaphrodite. Ludovica is… Ludovica is what? In ecstasy, certainly, lying supine, head thrown back onto her pillow, clothing crumpled. The fingers and thumb of her right hand are splayed, pressing gently through fabric into the yielding flesh of her breast. Her left hand rests on her stomach as though she is in pain, or holding herself down on the mattress. Penny and Diana sat there on New Year’s Eve, the day after their time at the temple. Penny thought it “exquisite”. She said that Ludovica, “beautiful Ludovica, looks to be in the throes of passion”:
Diana looked at me, and remarked that the saint certainly seemed fetching. Then she let a grin slowly form on her lips. She restrained herself from laughing, with some effort, until she saw in my own wide-eyed face that I had taken her meaning, and then she controlled herself no longer and laughed so loudly that I thought someone would take it as pain or weeping and come to her aid. It was infectious, however, and I could not help but join her, until we held each other and slowly regained our composure. Such a silly little pun to create such a stir, but its effectiveness said a great deal about the high spirits in which we find ourselves. And in truth, Ludovica does, indeed, appear to have been brought to a fetch by the touch of some unseen agency.
The couple spent the rest of their Saturday together, looking at the art and “assorted bibelots” in the lower-floor gallery, eating with the rest of the family, and, in the late afternoon, readying themselves for the dinner and party to be held that evening. Diana explained to Penny that it was to be a relatively small affair, not least due to the expense of June’s celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. There were around twenty people at dinner, whom Penny described as an “odd collection of relatives, minor nobility and army-types, and their wives, most of whom seemed to be elderly women determined to present themselves as far younger than they could reasonably be assumed to be.” It was the usual white-tie affair, with two extra courses and the occasional toast for good measure. At the party afterwards a string quartet and a soprano provided the entertainment, which Penny and Diana found to be “dreadfully dull”.
I had toured the downstairs rooms before settling in the gallery. The public areas included the room in which Penny had taken breakfast. Some of the walls had suffered from damp over the past hundred years, their murals erased and replaced with whitewash. There was no more resting place for Titania, just an emptiness where one might imagine her to be, amongst the thyme. It contrasted with the dining room, which had been decorated in the hope of recreating the nineteenth-century heyday of the house. A large, mahogany table was laden with porcelain place settings and crystal glasses, glinting in the light from two elegant, if gaudy, chandeliers. Other rooms were similarly decorated in late-Victorian garb, but their desire to be a facsimile was at odds with my purpose. When I drew my picture of Penny’s time with Diana—from Penny’s own words, and the painting, and the sculptures in the church—I retained the freedom to imagine the details as I wished. Equally, I could leave some ingredients out of focus, a blur of the period, without encroachment on the story I wished to tell: Klein wrapped in tape hiss, a Venice of shadows and subtle lights, a room leaning in on itself, supported by yellows and purples and my desire. So I had moved swiftly past the chairs and tables, the umbrella stands and sideboards, the red-roped areas with carefully typed explanatory texts perched on brass poles.
In the gallery there was breathing space. I exhaled and the room welcomed the intrusion. I had been there for quite some time, however, and I began to feel that I was attracting the attention of the man in the hall. Whenever I glanced at him he was lost in his newspaper, and never showed the slightest interest in anything but the sports pages. He was untroubled, still, that I had claimed the marble bench as my own. Yet I could no longer remain there, reading. There was a sense of social pressure that existed purely in the absence of any real society to cushion its effect on me. I could have lost myself if there had been crowds, families dragging unwilling children past me, elderly couples peering at labels and reading them aloud to each other, questions about tea rooms echoing around. I did not belong, and felt the need to portray some semblance of the casual visitor, or my own idea of a casual visitor. I stood up, placed the diary back into my bag and walked down the length of the gallery, away from the paper-reading man and towards the spiral staircase.
Upstairs, the shelves of the library were empty: those around the balcony completely so, those on the ground floor sparsely decorated with small porcelain statues and folded index cards. Each card gave a fragment of the history of the room: its architecture and decoration, the books it once housed, the story of their transfer to the British Library in the early forties. Penny’s gold numbering remained, some numbers clearer than others beneath sediments of dust and soot. Case 23 was exactly where she described it, near the top of the staircase from the gallery. It held nothing at all, but in the case to its immediate left was a bust of Socrates, which I assumed must be the one which hid the keys all those years ago. The desk on which it used to stand was long gone, and with it the card catalogue. It was a library of all the stories never written.
The stairs to the balcony were roped off, as was the door at the west end of the room. The only exit was the staircase connecting library and gallery, except in the case of a fire, which a discreet sign suggested could be escaped by opening the forbidden west door. I thought that it must be awfully congested in the summer, when the house was busier, but looking around I started to gain the impression that it was never particularly busy. It seemed like a work in progress, a house which had lost its original purpose and not yet gained a new reason to exist. The idea of its being a public attraction had taken shape, somewhere, in some board meeting, but there was a long way to go before Barbroke House took its place amongst the pantheon of England’s stately homes. I wished that it would forever remain on the sidelines, a destination for the few for whom it held a particular interest, but never host to streams of day-trippers. I felt a sense of ownership, as though I were a member of a secret society open only to those with some link to the history of the place. Diana had gifted membership to Penny, and Penny, even if she never knew it, was always going to bequeath the gift to me.
There were chairs set by the windows and, unlike the marble bench, clearly intended for the use of visitors. If there were any doubts in the mind of a cautious sightseer they were assuaged by a pink card on which was written, in a pre
tentious, uncial hand, “We invite our guests to sit and rest awhile by these windows. Please enjoy the view to the south, over the gardens and lake, to the gatehouses and approach.” I took up the offer of a seat but faced into the room, towards the bare shelves. Behind me, angelic snowflakes were thwarted, and melted against the windowpanes, buckling the landscape. I opened the diary and read on.
Penny and Diana were in the library, on New Year’s Eve. They came to get away from the party, as much to be with each other as to avoid unwanted company. Penny had been trapped in a corner of the long gallery, accosted by some friend of Diana’s brother who wanted to know everything about Oxford. He had about him, even after several glasses of champagne, enough good breeding to ask Penny’s opinion on every aspect of college life. He was not, however, well-bred enough to do anything with those opinions but cast them aside and provide his own in their place, based on experiences related to him by his elder brother, “a Balliol man”. Penny suffered his advances for “probably only a matter of minutes, although it seemed like hours” before Diana appeared with two full glasses, and told the boy that he was wanted by Peter in the smoking-room. The boy left, asking Penny to wait for him. Diana had other ideas: she handed Penny a drink before grabbing her arm and dragging her playfully up the spiral stairs. I could see them in front of me as I read, talking and laughing together, temporarily free of the strictures awaiting them on their return to the party below.
I ran away from home when I was six or seven, wanting that same sense of freedom, but lacking the clarity of purpose to do anything but wander in unfamiliar lands. I remember how big everything seemed, designed for adults and not for me. My surroundings seemed to respire, breathing out and collapsing around me, before they inhaled and everything rushed away, left and right and up over my head, everything so distant that I longed for them to come back to me, to suffocate me again. The rush of them was like the fall from the top of the roller-coaster—after the climb, the click-click-click, Jacob on his stairs—down, down and Dad’s hand in mine and my eyes shut tight as he had told me they should be. Icarus with Dædalus for company, only Dædalus died and Icarus ran away from home when he was six or seven, ran through the unlocked doors and away from the walls falling in from above. A nice lady stopped when she saw me crying, and asked where my parents were, and took me to the police station for telephone calls and a short drive home to a mother who had been facing a second loss. I have never been sure if one can be selfish when so young, and so alone, and so frightened.
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