Illyrian Spring

by Ann Bridge

  Rather late, she appeared in the little restaurant in the Piazza where she was to meet Nicholas for lunch; he was sitting looking resigned at a table in the low hot room, steamy with food and the damp clothes of the patrons. She apologised, described the chapel – ‘And look at this!’ and she drew out her sketchbook with the drawing of the iconostasis.

  ‘Not another pattern?’ said the young man, rather gloomily, taking it to examine.

  ‘Yes – such a beauty. And absolutely unmistakeable,’ she said eagerly. ‘I must go to the Museum this afternoon and find out about the date.’ Then his tone, rather belatedly, penetrated her enthusiastic preoccupation. ‘Does this all bore you very much?’ she asked, rather wistfully.

  ‘No no,’ he said quickly, ‘not a bit. I love it really. I was only teasing.’ He smiled at her, a very nice smile. ‘It only amuses me a little to see you get so eager about it. You don’t mind my thinking that funny, do you?’ he asked, cocking his head at her, in a very engaging way.

  ‘No,’ said Grace serenely. ‘The children always think I’m funny. Now tell me where you went.’

  Nicholas too had had a fruitful morning. He had gone to the Porta Aurea, the great northern gate, where his curiosity had been aroused by seeing on the wall of the inner court of the gateway, near a small door, a blue and white tin notice – ‘No. 1, Porta Aurea.’

  ‘It looked like a house number in a street,’ he said, ‘but there was no house to be seen, only the door in the wall. I thought I must go into this, so I rang the bell.’

  ‘You didn’t really?’ Lady Kilmichael interjected.

  ‘Of course I did! I wanted to find out where the house was. A young man came down, and, thank God, he spoke Italian, so I asked him if he would show me his house. He was frightfully pleased, and took me all over it. You go up a lot of stairs in pitch dark to a sort of first floor, and there are three or four little rooms all on different levels – a kitchen, and a place where an old party was ironing clothes, and one or two bedrooms – I can’t remember, and anyhow, there were onions and washing hanging up in all the rooms. But they are all very narrow, because they’re burrowed right out of the heart of the gateway walls, just like your chapel. It was a most extraordinary place. So now I’ve been to call at Number One Porta Aurea, Spalato, and I know what it’s like inside.’

  He was very satisfied with himself, and Lady Kilmichael rather envied him this insight into the domestic life of the Spalatans – or Splits, as Nicholas called them. He suggested that one day they should ‘do the Splits’ thoroughly, together, and see how many houses they could get into. Then he described the rest of his morning. He had gone out onto the sea front, to examine the south façade of the Palace. ‘It reminded me of parts of Edinburgh or Bath,’ he said – ‘all those houses somehow combined into one whole. Has it ever struck you,’ he went on, ‘what a peculiar feature that is of Palladian domestic architecture in England – the way a whole row of houses was built as a single unit, with a great pediment in the middle and often higher houses at the ends, to carry out the idea? Adelphi Terrace, for instance. On the Continent they tended much more to treat each individual house as an architectural unit in their Renaissance building.’

  Lady Kilmichael had never thought of this for herself, but on recalling certain foreign towns, and also Adam Street and John Street, Adelphi, she realised the justness of Nicholas’s observation, and agreed.

  ‘Adelphi Terrace and all that is Adam, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Of course. The Adam brothers practically were Palladian building in England,’ said Nicholas, making one of the sweeping assertions of youth. ‘Anyhow, they coloured the whole thing. But it’s odd to find something so like it here, that has happened by accident and is partly, at least, sixteen hundred years old.’

  Lady Kilmichael again agreed; but how little odd it was, she was very soon to find out. After lunch, she insisted on a return to the hotel to change into dry shoes, and then, in a taxi, they set out for the Museum, Nicholas making fun of her for fussing about wet feet.

  ‘They were cold,’ said Grace defensively. ‘I hate cold feet.’

  ‘I had an old Uncle who hated them too,’ said Nicholas, beginning to grin. ‘We were staying there once, and there was a huge dinner party, and someone started talking about cold feet, their cause and cure. And in one of those pauses – you know, when one hears every word – Uncle Nicholas, who was frightfully absent-minded, suddenly boomed out in the most innocent way – “My wife has the coldest feet of any woman I ever slept with!” My Mother was appalled.’

  He glanced rather shyly at Lady Kilmichael after telling this story, to see how she would take it. One of the rather crucial moments in any relationship between two highly civilised people is the making of the first even slightly risqué joke. Nothing kills an incipient liking more effectually, rouses a more violent sense of affront and distaste, than to have an impropriety, however funny, forced on one by a person from whom one is not yet ready to accept it. On the other hand, the first sharing of a slightly improper joke marks a definite step forward in any acquaintance. In this instance Nicholas Humphries had judged exactly right – the story itself, and the rather shy comicality of his expression as he told it, amused Grace Kilmichael enormously. And she rightly regarded his telling it as a mark of confidence. One of the things which always made her feel that perhaps she and Linnet were not quite a hopeless ‘mess’ was the fact that Linnet, even during those last cruel months, always came flying to tell her Mother the latest in the way of good stories, however hair-raising. Remembering this – ‘Didn’t your Mother see that it was funny?’ she asked Nicholas.

  ‘Not at the time – she was too shattered. Celia and I persuaded her to see it afterwards,’ he answered. ‘You see my Father can’t bear that sort of joke, and for years my Mother felt it unconscientious to be amused by what he would disapprove of. It’s really Celia who’s cured her of that; if anything, she’s more afraid of Celia now than of Father, so Celia is training her up bit by bit.’

  ‘Why is your Mother afraid of Celia?’ Lady Kilmichael asked, putting now the question she had deferred that morning. She awaited the answer with an eager expectancy that would have surprised the boy if he had realised it.

  ‘Oh, she puts it across her, one way and another,’ he answered airily. ‘It’s partly because she’s rather clever, and she uses her cleverness to do Mother down, now and again. But really I think it’s more that she keeps her at a distance. My Mother likes to pet and spoil people, and run round doing things for them, and to know everything they’re up to and help them do it. I don’t mind that – I think it’s rather sweet,’ the young man said simply, with an indescribable mixture of detachment and affection in his tone, ‘but Celia won’t stand for any of it. She keeps Mother in her place. I’m really the only person she’s allowed to spoil,’ he said, looking amused.

  ‘But why does Celia mind being spoilt?’ Grace asked, with almost painful interest. Linnet had lately – oh, so completely! – kept her own Mother at a distance, and Grace had so often and so bitterly wondered why. Perhaps from this member of Linnet’s generation she might learn the answer.

  ‘It fusses her,’ said Nicholas readily. ‘She’s quite able to do everything for herself now, in just the way she wants, and she doesn’t want someone else to do it for her even in some better way. She isn’t a child any more – that’s what my Mother always forgets, though it’s not for lack of being told! You see, really in a way,’ he went on, more slowly, ‘I suppose Celia is right when she says that it’s largely self-indulgence on Mother’s part. She’s trying to do things for Celia that Celia doesn’t in the least want done, because she herself enjoys doing them. Only I think Celia is rather too brutal about it. I don’t really want to have my bed choked with hot-water bottles whenever I sneeze, and be given whiskies and lemon last thing; or to have my suits forever reft away to be cleaned, and all that. If I want a whisky I can ask the butler for it; and I am really capable of looking out my own
trains for that complicated journey, sixty miles up to London! But I don’t mind letting my Mother do all these things, because she adores doing them. She doesn’t get too much fun,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t fidget me like it does Celia. Hullo, here we are.’

  The taxi had drawn up at a gateway. Passing through, they found a garden surrounded by cloisters, in which were set out sarcophagi, friezes, inscriptions, statues and fragments of statues – a most un-museum like place. A large modern building on the further side they rightly guessed to be the Museum proper. On their way thither Nicholas spotted two more pieces of stone carved with patterns like the fragment at Torcello. At the Museum Lady Kilmichael enquired for the Abbé B—, and was presently confronted by a courteous little old gentleman with white hair and a rather unclerical black suit; to him she explained her mission, and showed him, by way of illustration, the two carved stones in the cloister which Nicholas had found. The Abbé examined these objects through his pince-nez, and then turned to Lady Kilmichael. The man she must see, he said, was his young colleague, Dr Rajitch, who knew all about these patterns, and was indeed writing a book on them. If she would step back to the Museum, he would send for him. He himself, he courteously explained, was chiefly interested in the Roman antiquities. Lady Kilmichael, equally courteous, spoke with admiration of the arrangement of these in the cloister, and with enthusiasm of the Palace. The old man was delighted; he led her into the library, a large fine room, well lit and beautifully arranged, and began to spread out on the tables some of his most cherished treasures in the way of books. At these Nicholas and Grace gazed with interest, and indeed with some embarrassment, as the eager old savant piled up more and more tomes in front of them – books on the Palace in Latin, in Italian, in German. At last he plumped down a great folio volume before Lady Kilmichael, saying pleasantly – ‘The finest illustrations of all are in this – and it was written by an Englishman! See, here – and here’ – opening the book in the middle and showing some superb engravings of the Baptistery and the Porta Aurea. ‘Now I fetch Doctor Rajitch’ – and he stepped briskly out of the room.

  ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ said Nicholas, looking up at Lady Kilmichael across the table. She didn’t answer – she was absorbed in the big book of engravings. ‘Nicholas!’ she said a moment later in a startled tone – ‘Come and look at this!’

  He rose and went round to her, to see what she had found that surprised her so much. She had turned back to the title page – leaning over her shoulder he read, in heavy type, the author’s name –

  Robert Adam

  1764

  ‘Do you see?’ she said, turning and looking up at him with astonished eyes – ‘Robert Adam himself! He was here – he drew all this. No wonder the Palace front – you said at lunch it reminded you of English buildings that the Adams had done. Of course it does, if he made such a study of this place! It would be bound to colour his work. Isn’t it wonderful to find that out, here? Did you know he’d ever been here?’

  Nicholas did not, and in his heart of hearts he was a good deal impressed, both by the fact of the connection between Robert Adam and Spalato, and by Lady Kilmichael’s promptness in spotting it. But he was almost more impressed by his new friend’s delightful enthusiasm for such matters – a thing he was not in the least prepared for in women. She really was rather a remarkable person. And his heart warming to her for all this, being the child of his century he merely said, in a very neutral voice – ‘M’m – yes; Diocletian’s palace the direct ancestor of the Adelphi! It is quite a thought, isn’t it?’

  Grace was a little chilled. She knew that he thought her enthusiasm over her stones merely funny, and her own family’s attitude to her interests had prepared her for that. But this was architecture, his own subject, and she had expected him to be rather pleased. At this check to her eagerness she realised suddenly that she was cold and tired, that the hotel would be chilly when she got back to it, that she was in a strange town, where she knew no one except this perverse boy, and that it was pouring with rain. She looked down at the book again, and began to turn the pages. ‘Well, I think it’s rather wonderful,’ she said – and though she tried to speak cheerfully, her voice, in spite of herself, held a note of reproach.

  To her great astonishment, Nicholas suddenly patted her shoulder, several little quick pats, in the ‘There – there – there’ manner that one uses to console a child. ‘Of course it is! I think so too, really,’ he said, poking his head round to see her face, and grinning at her. ‘Only you’re so—’

  He had no time to finish his sentence. At that moment – ‘Voici Monsieur le Docteur Rajitch!’ said the Abbé, bustling back into the library. Lady Kilmichael stood up to greet the newcomer, a stout young man with very fair hair and immense spectacles. Dr Rajitch only spoke German besides his native Serbo-Croat; on learning that she spoke it also, he begged her to do him the favour to step into his room, where he had all his photographs and materials. ‘Your son will perhaps amuse himself among the collections,’ said the Abbé in French. Nicholas saluted this relationship with raised eyebrows, but Grace felt unequal to coping with it at the moment, and was borne off by Dr Rajitch to his sanctum.

  There followed for Lady Kilmichael a most strenuous afternoon, sustaining a highly technical conversation in an unfamiliar tongue. And on the whole it was singularly inconclusive. Dr Rajitch was writing, he told her, a book on these very patterns in which she was so much interested, to be entitled – ‘The Universal European Entwined Ornament-Motives.’ He traced for her on a marked map their distribution on the Continent – all through the Balkans, up the Adriatic coast to Northern Italy, and right across the Lombard plain into Southern France; down the Italian peninsula as far as Ravenna, which was full of them, and a little further – in Southern Italy not at all. Nor, to his knowledge, were any such ‘motives’ to be found in Central or Northern Europe, nor in the Iberian peninsula.

  How watertight the compartments of knowledge were, Grace thought. Here on the one hand was Nigel, studying these patterns as a Scottish-Irish development of art; and on the other Dr Rajitch, quite prepared to write a book on their ‘universal’ European character, but wholly ignoring the tremendous flowering of such ornament on the western coasts of the British Isles. When her turn came, she described the abundance of such work in Britain: the great crosses of Ireland; the similar crosses on the West Coast of Scotland; above all, the wealth of incised tomb slabs bearing the same designs, not only in the important ecclesiastical centres such as Iona, Saddell and Kiells, but in small and obscure country churchyards all up and down the coast, from the Clyde to the Butt of Lewis. She produced her drawing of the iconostasis in the Martins-Kapelle, and extracted from him the information that the Martins-Kapelle was either ninth or tenth century, no one knew which for certain, and that the iconostasis might be contemporary or might not – probably was.

  But Dr Rajitch was not to be turned aside by the Martins-Kapelle. He was at once thrilled and appalled, it seemed to Grace, to learn that his ornament-motives extended to what he called ‘the Atlantic coastal lands of Europe,’ especially to Ireland; this discovery would not only necessitate a fresh chapter in his book, but might call for a modification of his theory as to their distribution. Ever since Torcello Grace had been wondering how the designs found their way from Argyllshire to the Adriatic – Dr Rajitch now began, audibly, to speculate how they might have found their way from the Adriatic to Argyll. It was Lady Kilmichael’s first personal introduction to the continental outlook. She had never thought of Great Britain as an ‘Atlantic coastal land,’ an obscure and outlying fringe of Europe. Like many English people she tended unconsciously, in her heart of hearts, to think of Europe, taking it by and large, as a Dark Continent, full of foreigners – very civilised, but still foreigners. Being an artist, and having spent a good deal of time in France, she felt this less than many people, and hardly extended it to the French; but her reaction to Dr Rajitch’s point of view, here in Jugo-Slavia, in a way revealed her
own feeling to herself, and she was amused by it.

  Dr Rajitch surprised her by another manifestation of the continental outlook too – the extraordinary respect accorded to Ireland as a centre of culture, of art and religion during the Dark Ages. It was Ireland which bothered Dr Rajitch most. Ireland, he said rather gloomily, might conceivably have been the fountainhead, the original source of entwined ornament-motives; Ireland and not Asia; and the designs might have been carried over Europe in illuminated manuscripts, as Irish scholarship had been carried. But no – on second thought the dates did not fit; if the period she gave him for the Irish crosses was correct, Ravenna and the Balkan work was far earlier. For the moment the problem of Ireland remained insoluble – as did the strange gap in Central Europe, extending from Northern Italy almost to the Roman Wall, in which no entwined ornament-motives were to be found. And that was all there was to be said. Dr Rajitch begged for photographs of the Irish and Scottish Stones, which Lady Kilmichael promised, in due course, to send him; and they exchanged cards – a little doubtfully on Grace’s part. But the curator of the Museum in Spalato could hardly be a menace! And then – considerably enlightened, but rather more tired than before – she took her leave, and went to see what had become of Nicholas. Good heavens! it was half-past five – she had been stewing with that Professor for over two hours. What had that poor boy been doing with himself?

  Nicholas had been doing something rather unwonted, for him – quite spontaneously taking a good deal of trouble for somebody else. He wandered through the museum for some time, but after an hour his interest was exhausted, and he began, rather gloomily, to look at his watch and feel that he was wasting his time. He had hoped to get down to painting at once, at Spalato – at least to get what materials he wanted together today, to prepare a canvas and choose a subject, so that he might begin without delay on the morrow. And here was the whole day being wasted, frittered away over those dim patterns which enthralled Lady Kilmichael so. How funny of her to care so much about them – but evidently she knew a lot. She wasn’t in the least like ordinary people (ordinary parents, he meant), what with her painting, and this passion for a rather specialised archaeology. Ordinary people fussed over their houses and children, and gave tea parties and dinner parties, and read novels; but they never seemed to be ferociously interested in anything which took them out of an armchair – only in D. H. Lawrence, whom they discussed by the hour together. Extraordinary! He himself could see nothing whatever in Lawrence – he didn’t like novels to be so clinical; and most of his friends felt the same. It was very much one up to Lady K. that she had never mentioned D. H. Lawrence so far – as a rule older people simply rubbed your nose in him from the word go; one of the more hateful of older people’s many futile and boring assumptions about one as a member of the genus ‘young’ was that one was interested in D. H. Lawrence! But she was much too intelligent for that – she was very intelligent. Only so funnily eager! How thrilled she had been over Robert Adam. He hadn’t meant to dash her about that – he was rather an idiot, sometimes! Of course the connection between Spalato and the Adam buildings in England was really exciting, and it was most spry of her to spot it. He hoped she wasn’t really soured – especially when she’d been such an angel about his losing her book.