Illyrian Spring

by Ann Bridge

  On such occasions coherence is not an outstanding feature.

  ‘Nicholas, what on earth are you doing here? We understood you were in Greece.’

  ‘Well, Grace, this is quite unexpected!’

  ‘Is this where you’ve been all the time, Mums?’

  ‘Darling, how well you look! No, not all the time.’ The persistent Bishop and Lady Kilmichael’s train, seeing that some exciting encounter was in progress, regretfully but politely melted away. Each family rather drew together, till on Sir Walter’s recovering himself sufficiently to look at his watch and mention food, Lady Kilmichael said – ‘Nicholas, won’t you bring your Father along to the Via del Levante? It won’t be so crowded there.’

  ‘Do you know one another, then?’ the General enquired, fixing his eyeglass to stare in bewilderment from Lady Kilmichael to Nicholas.

  ‘Oh dear, yes – we’ve seen no end of one another. Come on, Father, let’s go and eat – you must be starving.’

  ‘But your Mother wrote over a fortnight ago that you were going to Greece, Nicholas. You weren’t at Ragusa then, but some place with a peculiar name.’

  ‘Komolac, I expect.’

  ‘I daresay,’ said the General helplessly, as he found himself being shepherded by his son, with an air of complete confidence, along some very small smelly streets, in company with that artist woman who appeared to be Sir Walter Kilmichael’s wife. Though what she was doing here, where her family had certainly had no expectation of finding her, and why she knew Nicholas, was more than he could understand. In his bewilderment he clung firmly to the one point on which he felt on firm ground.

  ‘Then have you been to Greece and come back? I should like to get this clear.’

  ‘No, Father – I never went near Greece – I was taken ill on the day I meant to start.’

  ‘Ill, Nicky? You poor lamb! What was it?’ Celia asked, putting in her oar.

  ‘Tummy, as usual,’ grunted Nicholas. He didn’t like being poor-lamb’ed by Celia any better than being cross-examined by his father.

  In the other family Greece also held the field for the time being – it seemed a safe subject in these rather disconcerting moments of unexpected reunion.

  ‘Then have you not been to Greece after all, Grace? Lady Roseneath wrote that you were off there, when she saw you in Venice.’

  ‘No, Walter. This coast is so lovely, and there’s so much to paint, that I’ve just lingered and delayed.’ (It all looked so different, seen through Walter’s eyes. It had been so inevitable while she was doing it.) ‘But what are you cruising for? I’d no idea you meant to do that – no, up this passage; we’ll be there in a moment. The food’s incredible at this little place.’

  ‘Poppy’s been seedy – Sir John Lord sent him cruising.’

  ‘Really, Walter? What was it? I am sorry.’

  ‘Nothing much – just a bout of insomnia. I only saw Lord to please Gina.’

  Then the two conversations coalesced.

  ‘Your Mother said nothing about your being ill. When did this happen, Nicholas? I should have expected to be told.’

  ‘General Humphries, that was my fault,’ Lady Kilmichael put in from behind. ‘I ought to have written to your wife at once. But while Nicholas was so bad I really hadn’t a moment to do anything – and I never thought to make Dr Halther do it. I did write as soon as I remembered, but that was rather late.’

  The General stared. ‘You were there when he was ill? And is Dr Halther the local doctor? I really don’t quite follow.’

  ‘Considering that Lady Kilmichael nursed me for three days and nights on end, practically without lying down—’ Nicholas began.

  ‘No, Dr Halther isn’t a doctor at all. We were staying with him – at least Nicholas was. And of course when he got ill I looked after him – but really it was nothing! Only I’m so sorry I didn’t think to write,’ said Lady Kilmichael hastily.

  ‘Where was all this, Grace – I’m not quite clear,’ Sir Walter said with equable coolness. ‘And when was it? Recently?’

  ‘Just the week before last – oh, here we are! Yes, in under this arch. I’ll tell you all about it presently, Walter. Nicholas, rout out Signor Antonio and see if he’s got spini di mare today.’

  ‘Spini di mare are sudden death, I may say,’ Nicholas observed, slouching off towards the hovel in the corner of the courtyard, while the party, still in the utmost mental confusion, sat down at the little tables under the great walnut.

  ‘And vermouth at once, Nicholas,’ Lady Kilmichael called. ‘The vermouth here is very peculiar, but quite delicious, I think,’ she observed socially to the General. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a sort of controlled gleam of amusement flash for a moment in Linnet’s face, as she said this; she realised that Linnet was enjoying her dealings with the General. Little wretch! She was looking very well, and so pretty, the darling thing! As they drank their vermouth Celia observed to her brother – ‘We half expected to come on you in Greece, you know; isn’t it funny that we should find you here, where we didn’t, and not there?’

  ‘Well said, old mole!’ was Nicholas’s only reply to this. Grace understood – like him she was beginning to feel the subject of Greece as intrusive as Hamlet’s father; she saw Linnet glance at Nicholas with that gleam again – she too had caught the point, and was enjoying it.

  Over the spini di mare Sir Walter began to display that grasp of essentials and capacity for direct action which had made him an international power as well as an intellectual force. Abandoning the unequal contest with the immediate past, he turned to the future. ‘This crab, or lobster, or whatever it is,’ he observed, ‘is simply paradisal. I should like to eat it for a week! Linnet, what do you say to giving Venice a miss – you’ve seen it before – and staying here for a few days with your Mother? I feel sure Captain Henry could be persuaded to put in for us on his way south again.’

  Linnet said that Ragusa was the most rapturous place she had ever seen, and that she would adore to. Clever Poppy!

  ‘I suppose there’s a possible hotel?’ Sir Walter pursued, looking enquiringly at his wife.

  ‘The Imperial’s quite good.’

  ‘Is that where you are?’

  ‘Yes. Do do that, Walter – there’s such a lot I’d like you and Linnet to see.’

  ‘Is the food like this?’

  ‘No – there’s no other food like this in Ragusa!’

  ‘It was rather brilliant of you to find this place,’ Sir Walter said appreciatively – ‘I don’t think even in Besançon I’ve met quite this quality in a sauce.’

  ‘The chemist put us on to it,’ Nicholas here observed.

  ‘The chemist?’

  ‘Yes – he’s a yachtsman too!’

  Again Linnet’s glance rested for a brief moment on Nicholas. To produce a gastronomic yachting chemist in a difficult conversation was a feather in any young man’s cap. But what was all this about him, and Mums, and his illness? It was all most intriguing. Linnet was dying to know if Celia’s brother was staying at the Imperial too. Mums was so artless – she felt sure he was.

  So after lunch Sir Walter went down to the harbour, to return to the Mindora Star, lying off the mole, and make his arrangements with the captain. The rest of the party showed him the way, and then wandered back along the Stradone. The General, having at last been satisfied about Greece and Nicholas’s illness, had more or less resigned himself to confusion about everything else, and embarked with Lady Kilmichael on a subject in which he felt himself at home – the defects in his son’s character. He developed this theme, while the girls walked with Nicholas.

  ‘And for another thing, the boy’s mad on painting,’ he presently remarked.

  Grace took a breath and plunged. ‘Yes, and he is so extraordinarily good at it that he ought never to do anything else,’ she said firmly.

  He looked at her, surprised by her tone – his eyeglass gave the impression of disliking what it saw, and dropped the length of its cord.
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  ‘It’s no career for a man,’ he pronounced.

  ‘To be brilliantly successful at something is quite a good career for anyone, I should have thought,’ Lady Kilmichael returned stoutly. Linnet glanced over her shoulder at her Mother, and glanced away again.

  The General shifted his ground. ‘There’s no money in it,’ he said, rather shortly. This Lady Kilmichael looked so soft and gentle, she had the makings of a charming woman; but she was evidently stubborn at heart, like all the rest of them.

  ‘I’m not really so sure of that,’ she said in a deceptively gentle voice. ‘Emanuel James makes about six thousand a year.’

  This time it was Celia who glanced back. ‘He’s brought up twenty-seven children on it, you know, Daddy!’

  ‘Celia!’ ‘The boy isn’t Emanuel James,’ the General said with disapproving finality to Lady Kilmichael. (How did she know how the boy painted? There was something at the back of this.) ‘He’s only dabbled with it. Celia is taking it up – that’s quite another matter. They think well of her at the Slade.’

  Lady Kilmichael’s expressions of civil gratification at this intelligence were drowned in the sudden outcry raised by the two girls at the sight of M. Kraljic’s trays of jewellery. They must look, they must buy something – and while they examined bracelets of silver chain-work, bags of heavy gold embroidery, and long dangling gilt earrings, Nicholas stepped up to Lady Kilmichael.

  ‘You’ll do no good,’ he muttered. ‘You see for yourself now what he’s like.’ His face had resumed the discouraged and discontented expression which had so struck her at Torcello. ‘This is all quite awful,’ he went on. ‘And what he’ll say if he tumbles to the fact that I’ve been painting solidly for a month goodness knows! Do be careful.’

  ‘Don’t worry too much,’ Grace returned in the same tone. ‘I think perhaps I may—’

  ‘Mums, I must have this! It’s only five hundred dinars,’ Linnet interrupted, coming up with a heavy silver bracelet. ‘Have you got some money on you?’

  ‘Five hundred dinars! But that’s fantastic, Linnet. Give it to me!’ She advanced through the group and went up to the shopkeeper, who stood smoothing his stomach in his doorway with an air of happy anticipation.

  ‘Good day, M. Kraljic. So you are making fun of my daughter!’ she said cheerfully. ‘She tells me that you are asking her five hundred dinars for this.’ She held out the bracelet. ‘Or she is mistaken, perhaps?’

  M. Kraljic’s face at that moment repaid observation. He had thought himself confronted by the safe and wealthy ignorance of stranci [foreigners] from a cruise, and here was that Englishwoman, who was becoming a regular and valued, but a very discriminating customer of his, in charge of the party! It was extremely embarrassing. He explained hurriedly that the young lady was mistaken – he had meant three hundred dinars. Grace bargained a little, and the bracelet passed into Linnet’s hands for two hundred and fifty-five.

  ‘It’s really better to buy several things at once,’ Lady Kilmichael said to the General, whose eyeglass registered modified approval of this transaction – ‘one gets much more off if one gets things in a lump.’ Celia now invoked her good offices for the purchase of a gold handbag; then the whole party drifted out of the shop again. Mme Amandi’s jackets next caught Linnet’s eye, and she and Celia darted ahead to look at them, while the others followed.

  ‘Daddy, one of these I simply must have,’ Celia declared as they came up.

  ‘This looks a very expensive shop – you’d probably get them much cheaper in some side street,’ the General protested.

  ‘No – Mme Amandi is the only person who has these; it’s a monopoly of hers,’ said Grace calmly. ‘She isn’t frightfully unreasonable, considering what they are, if you bargain with her a bit.’

  ‘There, Daddy!’

  ‘Well, if Lady Kilmichael will kindly help you—’ the General said, resigned.

  Grace, Celia Humphries and Linnet made their way into the shop. It was at all times so crowded with objects that the extreme mobility of Mme Amandi’s ample person about her own premises was an unfailing source of wonder to Grace; but today ingress to one half of it was completely blocked by the reverse of a gentleman in a light grey overcoat, who was stooping to examine some object. Grace, waiting to attract Mme Amandi’s attention, glanced at him with involuntary curiosity, to see what he was looking at – to her astonishment she saw that he was bending over Nicholas’s nearly finished picture of San Salvatore. At that moment Nicholas and the General, entering, bumped into him; the gentleman straightened himself up with a smart French oath, and turned round. It was M. Breuil.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Sorry, Breuil,’ said the General, recoiling. The Frenchman, usually so punctilious, made absolutely no response, but stood looking with starting eyes at Lady Kilmichael. (Really, this was a day for goggling, Linnet thought, observing them – people did nothing but meet and stand transfixed.) Then he pushed his way across to her, crying ‘Mademoiselle Stanway! Mais quel plaisir!’ Lady Kilmichael greeted him with equal pleasure; but at once, briskly, he turned back to the canvas. ‘C’est de vous, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘No – it’s Mr Humphries’. Nicholas, come here – you must meet Monsieur Breuil.’

  Linnet glanced at the young man as he made his way slowly forward – crammed and jammed as they were in the little shop, every movement was slow and involved the displacement of somebody else; but the girl noticed that he walked like a person in a dream, and that his eyes too were, as she put it to herself, absolutely popping.

  ‘Ah, je ne le croyais guère! Pourtant il y a des ressemblances! Enchanté, Monsieur,’ the Frenchman said, all in a breath. Nicholas said, ‘How do you do?’ very deliberately, in English – then he turned to Lady Kilmichael. What with the sudden appearance of his father and Celia, the discovery that his new friends were Sir Walter and the much-talked-of ‘Linnet,’ and the general embroilment, confusion and surprise, the full import of that half-heard conversation in the cloister had escaped him – he had wondered vaguely at these people’s knowing Grace Stanway, as one meets with a certain unbelief a personal friend of the Pope’s, but that was all. But the Frenchman’s exclamation could not be mistaken. ‘Are you Grace Stanway?’ he said slowly, with a sort of appalled incredulity, staring harder than even he had ever stared before.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Grace, smiling. She was so delighted at this heaven-sent, though wholly inexplicable, apparition of the dealer that she would have smiled at Rose Barum just then.

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’ asked the young man, almost resentfully.

  ‘Because I didn’t want you to know!’ She was still gay. Linnet’s own eyes were worth observation at that moment – fancy Mums talking like that! Oh, this was fun. And why had she swindled the wretched boy?

  ‘That explains a lot,’ was all he said, rather sourly. But M. Breuil now intervened again, with a spate of questions in rapid French. M. Humphress had been painting long? Was attached to what gallery, had worked with whom? Nicholas replied, now in French, to all of them – not long, no gallery – he had never shown in his life; Ruskin School of Art at Oxford, on his own, ‘et quelques mois à Vence avec Zarini.’ Even the unobservant Grace could not fail to notice the different tone in which Zarini’s name was now brought out – and as he spoke it, Nicholas threw her an indescribable glance, with half an eyebrow cocked. Her heart melted to him – angel! he was laughing at himself, even then.

  M. Breuil, however, was always the man of business. Had M. Humphress any other pictures here that could be seen? Nicholas hesitated, with a rather helpless glance at Lady Kilmichael. ‘Mais oui,’ she intervened, firmly – there were several, up at the Imperial Hotel, only a few steps away – would M. Breuil care to come and see them? That was precisely what M. Breuil not only wished but intended – and off they all trooped, past Onofrio’s fountain, out by the Porta Pile, and up through the Borgo. The General, whose knowledge of French was limited, had not been able to
follow half what passed, and walked in a state of complete bewilderment – today was a crazy day, everyone seemed to be where they weren’t expected to be, and know who they weren’t expected to know, and to do what they weren’t expected to do. One thing was clear – that young scamp Nicholas had been painting again; wasting his time – and money too, canvases cost a pretty penny – after he’d promised to give it up. He must have a word with him! Most awkward, all these people about – and all the time in streets, or shops, or churches; no privacy, not a chance to sit down and have a word quietly! However, he gathered that that Frenchman Kilmichael was always playing Contract with – though why spoil a good game? – Auction was good enough for anyone – was something to do with pictures, from the way he went on; and despairing for the moment of getting his ‘word’ with his son, who was entrenched as it were between the two girls, he bethought him to bring Celia into notice, and tackled the fellow.

  ‘C’est ma fille qui, er, peinte vraiment,’ he said, firmly, as they walked up the hill. ‘Elle peinte bien. Elle est à l’école du Slade.’ While M. Breuil, civil but mystified, listened to these statements, the young people walked behind. ‘Now the balloon will go up!’ Nicholas muttered gloomily to Celia. ‘Father’s beginning to boil already. Who is the old beaver, anyhow?’

  ‘I don’t know – I mean, he’s on the cruise, so I know him to speak to, but that’s all.’

  ‘He’s Mums’s dealer,’ Linnet put in. ‘I gather that much. I didn’t tumble to it on the boat. I daresay Poppy did, but he wouldn’t have mentioned it.’

  ‘But Nicky, have you been painting, after all? I thought—’

  ‘Yes, well you thought wrong – I have!’

  ‘With Lady Kilmichael?’ Celia hit with sisterly accuracy on the one point her brother would have wished to leave obscure.

  ‘She’s been so very kind as to give me some coaching now and then,’ he said, feeling like Judas for the minimising statement.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought Mums was much good at teaching,’ put in Linnet. ‘She’s so vague – she always says she doesn’t know herself why she does things.’