Stone Virgin

  It was quite impossible to remain at home any longer. The brown carrier bag he left in the care of Signora Sapori, its contents complete save only for the cufflink – this he took with him. He had no particular idea of a destination. Once in the street he turned on impulse towards the northern part of the city, crossing the Misericordia and Sensa canals, coming out finally on the wide rectilinear expanse of the Sacca, that great square bite in the northern shore of Venice. Here, below the bridge, he found a quiet place to sit, facing out towards the Lagoon, with the long façade of the Pallazzo Contarini opposite and the white walls of San Michele just across the water.

  Behind him, out of sight, the sun was setting. The wide expanse of the Lagoon opened out beyond the mouth of the Sacca, pale and luminous, with a straight track of red across it. From moment to moment, as he watched, this faded and spread, as if bleeding into the water. I could still go, he thought. A few minutes’ walk would take me on to the Fondamenta Nuova, right alongside the Burano boat stage. I could phone from Burano, she would come for me …

  She had phoned from Burano herself, that night. She had phoned to say she was not coming back. So Litsov had no reason to hang about in his suit near the water. Litsov, whom I hardly knew, whom I did not want to know or think about because I was falling in love with his wife; Litsov the pompous Platonist, with his shyness, his irritable vanity, blankly noble brows, not a likeable man. With that talent for making shapes of metal. Turned into a mere drowned shape himself. Because you see, Raikes told himself carefully, that is what was done to Litsov. He had not been dressed up for drowning at all, he had been drowned because he was dressed up, because he was intending to go to the mainland, because he would no longer stay in the prison of the island, laying the golden eggs. That is why she did not go back that night, not because of the fog, not because it was difficult or dangerous, but because she did not want to return with the boat. She made sure he would not get off the island. And then of course, from Burano, she had phoned Lattimer …

  Raikes stirred and sighed. It was the only possible explanation. Otherwise how could Lattimer have known what Litsov intended to do, what coincidence could have brought him out through the fog and the darkness of that evening? They must have been cheating Litsov for a long time, perhaps since they first installed him on the island. Something to do with the casting, making extra casts from his moulds probably, selling them as originals. Easy to do, on an international market. And at the prices Litsov was beginning to command … Lattimer would have all the necessary connections. It was a perfect set-up. Litsov is something of a recluse, you know. Then they had gone too far, he had become suspicious. But why had they held back his work like that, at the end? It had been only a matter of time, surely, before he found out. Had they taken this into account, foreseen it? And the phenobarbitone – presumably there had been no traces in his system. The fact that Litsov had been prescribed the same drug, by the same doctor, had made a deep impression on Raikes. Had Litsov refused, like himself, to cloud his visions? But no, Vittorini would have made a statement to the police. Litsov must have been in the habit of taking the drug, otherwise they would not have been so ready to see his death as misadventure. So it must have been kept from him somehow, or reduced, not just on that day, but before. Was that why they were holding his work back? Prices would rise after his death, for a while at least. In that case, sooner or later, one night or another, dressed up or not …

  His mind flinched away from this. Who would answer such questions now? Who would even ask them? Not himself, certainly – he had decided that already. It was still possible to believe that she had not wanted or intended the death. In a sense it didn’t matter. It was enough for him that she had known, from the moment of making the phone call, all through the night they had spent together. She had been feverish, restless, unable to sleep. He had supposed, he had allowed himself to believe, this was because of him … I must go to her, he thought, talk to her, a few words would be enough. This is in me, I am fabricating evil. My mind the host to it. No words even, a smile, a look from her eyes.

  But as he watched the flushed water fade slowly, saw the zones of the surface marked off by varying depths, Raikes knew he would not go. In moments not consciously registered but quite irrevocable, between the red and grey of this evening, some complex blend of logic, self-abnegation, an instinct of retreat, had corrupted his love for ever. This corruption was the truth now, beyond question. She had used him for her pleasure as she had used him for her safety. It was the thought of this pleasure now that he found least endurable. Had she wanted distraction, or had what she knew excited her further? She had been in heat, and her mind all the time cool, self-regarding, planning her safety. The sense of this mystery visited him like nausea, and for some moments he felt he might be physically sick. This, or something like it, must be the truth, his mind insisted. Everything he knew, everything he could remember, confirmed it. While they sat at dinner, while she gave him those precise instructions, Lattimer had been crossing the shrouded Lagoon towards the island, making his way across this very water, clear now and luminous to the horizon. Perhaps at the moment she cried out and shuddered in his arms, Litsov, who carried her picture in his wallet, had been choking his last.

  Out in the Lagoon groups of black stakes marked the entrance to the deep-water channel. The surface was darker around them, as if they were somehow staining the water. Dark objects darken in this light, pale ones increase their pallor, Raikes told himself, attempting by just observation to lessen the horror of his thoughts. If we had known each other longer, long enough for me to understand, or make an attempt at understanding, or to have acquired some intimate knowledge of wrongs done to her or harm suffered. But there had not been long enough for more than this pain of betrayal. Once more he remembered that gesture of hers, which he had thought so out of character, that stroking of the hand down the arm, at once self-protective and self-loving. It was money she had wanted. With money you can ensure your safety with your pleasure. What had she said that day? I want to be eternal …

  He took the cufflink from his pocket and looked at it closely: a disc of black stone, basalt probably, about the size of a man’s thumbnail, with a thin rim of silver; the part that went through the buttonhole was a thin oval, also of silver. Lattimer it was who had spoken about the importance of things, of material objects. Who would have thought that such a very small thing as this, an insignificant artefact of stone and silver, of no particular value or beauty, could have revealed so much? Because of course, Raikes told himself in that same careful way, this object, which is not proof of anything at all, carries certainty with it. It was as if everything, the whole story, had been there, just behind, waiting to form.

  There were random elements, of course. Chiara had acted on impulse, seized the occasion of his visit, the pretext of the fog; she had risked something – perhaps not much – to have someone to sleep with that night; she had taken a chance on his being willing to lie about it, implicate himself. Lattimer too, though the impulse was of a different kind: he could have waited, he could have had the pick of Litsov’s possessions; but he had needed to despoil the body freshly killed, needed a trophy to add to the others in that windowless shed in the garden. And he himself, was he not the worst, who had improvised the story, imprisoned himself in it, with no more to go on than this object in the palm of his hand, scattered memories, a process of deduction flawed by his own self-contempt? How could he have thought she might love him? Non si sa mai. Strange creatures … who knows what ideas they will get into their heads?

  This echo frightened Raikes and he got up to go. Darkness was not far off now. To the west the first lights of Mestre had come on. The water was pale gold across the whole surface of the Lagoon, covered with very faint corrugations. Suddenly the harmony of this vast rippled platter was disturbed by the passage of a motoscafo out towards San Michele. By the time the wake had died away the gold had gone, sea and sky were a uniform pale violet. Raikes stood for some mome
nts longer, looking northwards across the water. Out there in the gathering darkness was the speck of land that contained her. A luminous point he had thought it once. His throat tightened. Another kind of man was needed. Not me, he thought. Nor the police either. I have been here before, this is not the first time, I have taken this path before.

  He turned his back on the water and began to walk away in the direction of San Alvise. Almost at once, however, by a sort of homing instinct, he turned off towards his church, the place of his labours. He did not want to see anyone, talk to anyone. By disposition he was solitary – under stress he would always turn inward. Now he was glad of the approaching darkness, the relative quiet of the streets in this northern area of the city.

  The campo was almost deserted. There was light around the café and a few people were sitting within the enclosure made by the trellis and the potted shrubs. To Raikes’s intense dismay, as he was passing through this zone of light he heard his name called and next moment found himself confronted by Barfield, who was wearing a striped tie and a smart navy-blue blazer with glinting brass buttons.

  ‘We’re sitting over there,’ Barfield said with unwarranted familiarity, as if they had arranged to meet and it was sufficient now to indicate the place.

  ‘I was intending –’ Raikes felt suddenly bereft of all will and energy. Glancing in the direction indicated he saw sharp-featured Muriel in a red dress and clashing amber necklace, head tilted in the act of draining a glass. ‘I don’t think –’ he began.

  ‘We’re celebrating, old man,’ Barfield said. ‘Join us for a quick one?’

  Helplessly Raikes allowed himself to be escorted to the table. He greeted Muriel with a bow and sat down. ‘Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,’ he said. ‘That’s Milton.’

  ‘This is Barolo, very good stuff,’ Barfield said. ‘I’ll get another glass.’

  ‘What are you celebrating?’ From where he was sitting he could see across the square to the dim façade of the church, make out the box-like structure half-way up, within which his Madonna awaited the last stage of metamorphosis. Tonight, he thought, I must finish her tonight. Then tomorrow … It would be easier to face things if he had finished.

  ‘We’ve got the first of the paintings back on the wall.’ Muriel was wearing lipstick tonight and had granted her mouth too generous a shape with it. ‘The Woman Taken in Adultery,’ she said.

  ‘Consolidated, cleaned, restored, forgiven.’ Barfield said. ‘Sorry, I was thinking of the hymn. Reframed. Good as new. It’s the first to be completed, you know, so we thought we might make it a social occasion. All work and no play makes Jack a dull sod.’ His manner was more relaxed than usual, a fact which Raikes attributed to the workings of the Barolo.

  ‘We asked Owen,’ Muriel said, in her cross-patch fashion – no change in her, at least. ‘He hasn’t turned up yet and we’ve been here nearly an hour. And Pauline, of course …’

  ‘Perhaps they have other fish to fry,’ Raikes said. His voice sounded curiously pure and detached to him as if his words were distilling on the air rather than straggling from his larynx. He was in some neutral zone where warring elements meet and sheer off; Muriel’s celebratory perfume, Barfield’s gleaming buttons and his stripes of some obscure club or association, the house in the Lagoon with water slipping at the landing stage, Litsov’s meek mouth.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘congratulations anyway.’

  ‘We could never have done it,’ Muriel said, ‘could we, Jerry, if we hadn’t spent so many nights working late?’

  ‘And you handicapped,’ Raikes said vaguely. ‘Broken limbs, dislocations and so on.’ It was to their groans in the darkness that his quest had begun. Oh Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. All the saints and virgins staring down. ‘You battled on,’ he said.

  It was the right note. From the way Barfield was pouring out his Barolo, from the irritable but pleased stretching of Muriel’s reddened mouth, he could see that this remnant of the Tintoretto people were once more fully in their heroic role. This was Homeric stuff, the sweet carousing after hardships suffered and dangers survived.

  ‘Well, of course,’ Barfield said, ‘we’ve had our ups and downs, haven’t we, Muriel? But that’s what life is about, isn’t it? And you’ve got to be humble. We can’t know everything, can we? I mean, we don’t even know one another. Wasn’t it you who talked about people trying to learn about death by measuring corpses? That was early on, when we were just beginning here. I won’t tell you a lie, I was put out at the time. But you were right. Facts don’t get us all that far. And even when it comes to facts we never get the essential ones.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, take Tintoretto. We can analyse his paint surface until we know every colour he used, not only that but how he made them, the constituent elements. For example, we know that he made his gesso by roasting gypsum, grinding it to powder and binding it with animal glue. We know to the month when he gave up the gesso preparation and started painting on a dark ground. We know how he made the dark ground. We can look at a window frame and we can say this was done with white lead and a coarse brush. We can say that is arsenic sulphide, we can dissolve this in chloroform and prove it to be indigo. Every stage, from the first brushstroke … But we don’t possess, and we never will possess, the one essential piece of information.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘What did he use?’ Barfield widened his eyes in the visionary way Raikes now remembered. ‘What did he use to give his colours that quality of vibrancy? How is it that they do not fade? He used something else, some additive, some drying agent, completely undetectable by modern science.’

  ‘If it is undetectable, how do you know that it is there at all?’

  ‘It must be there. How else can you account for the special quality of radiance in late-fifteenth-century Venetian painting? Titian has it too. People have always recognized it. The Venetian Secret they call it. They knew something we don’t.’

  ‘You may be right,’ Raikes said, ‘but it seems odd to me to pin your faith on a material explanation, and one that is completely undemonstrable. It rather contradicts what you began by saying.’ He rose to his feet with a sense of effort. ‘I’ll have to be getting along,’ he said. ‘Are you working late tonight?’

  Muriel giggled, a rather startling sound. She said, ‘We’re not dressed for it.’

  ‘We’re going to have dinner when Owen comes,’ Barfield said.

  In haste to forestall an invitation, Raikes began at once to move away. ‘Well, have a nice time,’ he said. He crossed the lighted area adjoining the café, gaining with a sense of release the shadows beyond. He crossed the square on the far side, made his way round the curved projection of the apse and began immediately to climb up his ladder.

  For reasons still not clear to him he had never succeeded in obtaining a light from official sources; the matter had been passed from one authority to another without any result. Finally accepting defeat Raikes had provided himself with two strong, battery-operated lanterns which he could hang at different levels from the scaffolding. These he lit now and hung up, on either side of the Madonna’s head.

  His equipment was as he had left it, under the tarpaulin sheet. Half mechanically he donned overalls, cap and mask. Within a minute or two he was at work on the last remaining area of pollution, delicately despite his tiredness clearing the blackened, clotted gypsum from the sockets of the eyes, stroking away with the hail of particles the badger stripe of bleach that ran from the forehead to the bridge of the nose. The cutter hissed in fading or intensifying volume, combining with the hum of the compressed nitrogen fuelling the motor to make a varying pulse of power. Raikes shut his mind to all thought. The world was reduced to this small, dusty enclosure, the Madonna’s face, the steady white light of the lamps.

  When he stopped finally it was almost midnight and her face was without blemish, her sight restored. He knew now whose face it was – it was as if he had known all along, had unconscio
usly resisted the knowledge. That faintly smiling, dreaming face, the curve of the mouth, the eyes narrow and long, the wide, rather low forehead, he had seen them before: it was the face of the drowned girl, unwilling and yet complaisant, expressing a sort of secret complicity in her own death; it was the face which had looked at him through clear water, the same he had seen blurred and indistinct through some thicker, less transparent medium. Of course, he thought, she must have been the model, Girolamo used her for his model. Was she the naked, laughing girl in the room with the straight shadows? That band round her neck … She had died by violence, he knew it suddenly, and yet the face had been peaceful, slightly smiling, like the one before him now. The drowned do not smile. He thought of Litsov’s solemn stare, the meekly open mouth accepting death like a sacramental biscuit.

  He had stepped back to the rail, surprise at this recognition flooding his mind. Afterwards, when he tried to think about the next few moments, it seemed to him that he had ceased quite to look at the Madonna, or had relaxed his attention in some way, without however turning it on anything else. It was in this unguarded moment that Raikes felt the hush and resonance, the sense of exposure and isolation, the half-sweet, half-fearful sensation of swooning, and he was looking again at the statue, the scale was the same, there was the same distance between them, but the air had darkened, there was a sense of space, the source of illumination was not now the lamps but the Madonna herself, as she glowed in this darkness with a radiance of her own, a soft, enveloping flame of light, strangely local and contained, not reaching into the darkness all around. This time the sense of swooning was more intense, Raikes’s balance was lost, and he sank to his knees on the platform.

  How long this lasted he had no means of telling. He was still kneeling when he came to himself again, with that belated alarm, the Madonna above him, the bright lamps on either side with moths fluttering round them, her face turned slightly to greet the angel’s news.