‘All women?’ I asked.
But Alexander had mounted the platform of his polemics, and he disregarded my questions just as Tristan and Mr Rainfleury did. I did not blame him: it seemed that there was something about my opinions that made them easy to overlook. I wished that were not so; most particularly I wished it in Alexander’s case. And I could see that he was offended by his financial servitude to Tristan, and that I was in the way of this butting of male horns.
He continued, ‘And have you noticed how the artists often present these paintings from a keyhole point of view?’
I had. A keyhole point of view – that was myself and Alexander, snatching minutes in public places, dining on food that was not food, because I might not be absent for any family meals and also because he had told me that he could not afford to treat me as I deserved. He paid only when we went to the squalid coffee shops by the river.
‘A tea and a scone stretches my funds,’ he admitted, looking down. ‘And you deserve all the finest things, the very finest, Manticory. It is as well that you Swineys earn enough to buy them for yourselves.’
He looked at me for reassurance, and I gave it. ‘Yes, there is so much money floating about we hardly know what to do with it.’
His mouth twisted for a moment, though whether with irony or pain I could not tell. Then he began to talk to me of Paris, and the ‘coming men’, Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Pissarro, who were painting not what the eye sees, as he explained it, but as the eye sees. ‘To understand it properly, I’d need to show you the way they debate the shadows to capture light, movement,’ he told me. ‘Of course, I can never dare to innovate like that. With Elisabetta always wanting—’
You have to paint the way I have to write, I wanted to say, all banality and commerce. But I dared not risk the wound to his pride.
And if it often turned out that he had forgotten to recharge his pockets with coins at all before our excursions, I was determined not to notice it. And it did not matter at all, in any case, because my own purse was always full.
There were three weeks and then two weeks and then days left before the Swiney Godivas departed on their Venetian adventure. Darcy was entrusted with our new passports and the first-class tickets that cost nearly £8 each. She kept on her lap at all times a new velvet purse full of the gold Napoleons that Mr Rainfleury told us were currency everywhere in Europe.
I put myself through an intensive course of Italian study. I even stole some official time with Alexander under the pretext of Italian lessons. Alexander left five days ahead of us, having fortuitously remembered a long-postponed commission to render the portrait of a French aristocrat transplanted and living languidly in his native town.
I longed to ask, ‘Where do you stay in Venice?’ but did not, because I feared the answer.
‘Do not worry about what you are worrying about,’ Alexander urged me.
But he had still not said, even once, that he was happy I would see his home.
The Swiney Godivas, the ‘Miss Swineys’ and my Italian grammars and art books were transported to Paris via a brief sojourn in London. The day was stormy and the Dover steamer made us suffer every one of the twenty-one miles of the Channel. At Calais an elegant train was waiting to take us to Paris, our breath steaming the windows all the way. The London breakfasts we’d lost on the steamer were replenished eleven and a half hours later at the Hôtel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli, where we had our own fine drawing room looking over the gardens of the Tuileries and three large bed-chambers, where we slept in tribal alignments, with Darcy having a room to herself. Darcy did not permit us outside our gilded and flounced lodgings except to be Marcelled from head to foot with Monsieur Grateau’s famous steam ondulations. Titled ladies jostled genteelly for appointments but Marcel Grateau had sent his card to our hotel, scenting an opportunity for mutual publicity. We Swineys posed for a photograph in his salon, fully ‘ondulated’ by a cunningly simple device that he and his assistants heated on a gas stove. I made one secret excursion to the sensational show of the Société anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, so that I could tell Alexander that I had seen the work of the ‘coming men’ of whom he’d spoken with such fervour. When I returned, dazzled with captured light, Darcy told me that she was on the point of calling the police. I had to promise Enda that I would not leave her at the mercy of Darcy’s temper by further disappearances.
From Paris, we came by train to Nice and over the Alps to Italy, shimmering with spring. While my sisters congregated in the dining car, I sat in the finely cushioned first-class carriage and fed on my books, making sense of where we were to go and what we were to be when we got there.
From the colour plates and the captions I began to learn things about hair that Tristan would never master. The paintings pleased me more than photographs, for I felt in constant dialogue with Alexander as I examined each colour plate. Moreover, I felt that I knew intimately what was depicted by Titian and Giovanni Bellini. As if they had worn Swiney hair on their own heads, they knew all the places hair can fall: where the bare arm meets the bare shoulder, along the elbow, rustling into the well of the clavicle, dividing itself at the breast. And if it can fall as a light, porous, penetrable veil, why then all the better, for the veiled woman is an object of more erotic speculation and desire than a naked one.
While we rattled comfortably through France towards Italy, I was learning how the Venetians loved the colour red. My books taught me new names and shades of red – scarlatto, cremesino, rosso, marrone.
And in Venice, it seemed, there was nowhere they liked those reds better than on a lady’s head, and cascading down her back. In their churches, Titian had provided the Venetians with redheads to gaze at even while they prayed. Perhaps the illiterate – or the imaginative – among them thought that they were hymning the red hair of the ladies instead of God? Or even thanking Him for furnishing their native city with such a luxuriance of red hair.
Now I was about to arrive in Venice with more red hair than the Venetians had ever seen, wishing it to be seen by only one Venetian, Alexander Sardou.
It was a mild silky night draped with organza wisps of cloud. An egg yolk of a moon, which I felt that I knew, hung over the water dripping runnels of yellow light as our train muscled over the narrow causeway into town. Venice glowed russet where the lamps lit it, glowered mossy black elsewhere.
I knew that Alexander could not be at the station. He had telegrammed us in Paris regretting an ‘unavoidable commitment’. I would not truly have arrived in Venice until I had seen him. Instead, we were met by Signor Bon himself, a lanky, quiet man in his thirties with expressive green eyes under a generous brow and a crown of crisp chestnut hair. An agreeable scent of sweet leather and milky coffee lingered about his person. His English was excellent, his voice low and pleasing.
After the introductions, Ida remarked, ‘This is a good creature. Do you see what a good creature it is? And the legs are shapely too. Darcy, remember Mr Rainfleury says that you may not pinch me in public. Please wait till we get home.’
It was, I thought, a shame that Darcy seemed to have fixed on treating Signor Bon as if she were his landlord and he her recalcitrant tenant. He seemed to accept her disdain without resentment – in fact I thought I saw the corners of his lips twitch upwards once or twice. He gallantly tolerated my attempts at Italian without laughing at them.
Guided by Signor Bon, we handed over our tickets to the station gate-keeper, ran the gauntlet of the passport inspections with speed and jocularity, and suffered our luggage to be opened by the customs men, who promptly confiscated Mr Rainfleury’s cigars.
Outside the station, the water winked at us slyly, urging us to forget our reticules and our tiredness. Signor Bon helped us into two gondolas with respectfully gentle hands. We set off through moon-sequinned waves.
To my surprise, nothing surprised me. My first journey through Venice was like combing my own hair – slowly, with the teeth of the comb buried
deep in the bed of the hair, a little hair-breath raised by the action, and a tint of hair-scent too – and finding something new, and mysterious, among its familiar textures and smells.
The palazzi and churches let their fretted stones hang down into our faces like beautiful, insistent ghosts. Beckoning lanterns hung at arched water-gates. Inside their houses, exquisitely dressed Venetians displayed themselves in glowing tableaux so that each palace seemed to host a puppet theatre performing just for us. The city was mystical and barbaric all at once, a floating fortress so delicate that the fairies would hesitate to place the weight of their wings on it. I never saw a place that wanted loving so desperately. My sisters were silenced by the sight; even Darcy forbore to carp.
It is a taste of our own Swiney medicine, I thought, to be dazzled by an unnatural plenty of beauty.
We passed the smiling mouths of side canals; more palaces shied away coquettishly or loomed down with faintly patronising friendliness. I felt not immaterial to the intensity of their engagement.
This, I thought, this is for me.
I smiled as we passed a Gothic window lit up by a chandelier. I thought of the seashell lamp that used to hang in the Harristown cottage, whispering of the ocean, or so I’d believed. No, it was telling me of Venice, it was whispering of this all the way over the sea to Ireland. Perhaps the creature of the shell once patrolled the Adriatic floor on a slimy foot, and found this place, and ever after boasted of it.
My sisters remained uncharacteristically silent, except Ida, who whispered to me, ‘It is like the perfume counter at Clery’s, when you try too many scents at once. It makes you happy and confused. It makes me want to play my fiddle at it.’
‘It is like that,’ I told her.
Mr Rainfleury sat between Enda and Berenice, not daring to hold the hand of either, though you could see his very ears convulsed with romance. I was almost sorry for him, craving Alexander’s presence as I did, with extreme impatience. Soon I would see Alexander and I would not share him with anyone, not even a Venetian mosquito, and certainly not with Elisabetta, I thought defiantly. I felt Signor Bon’s eyes on me. I smiled at him, offering silent compensation for Darcy’s loud sniffs.
He smiled back, his face pleasantly creased.
Ida was right, I thought. It is a good creature.
But my thoughts were taken up with a different one, my paler, pale-eyed Alexander. We’d been separated just days but I struggled to superimpose his image on the rich backdrop of Venice. Signor Bon, with his chestnut hair and green eyes, and that voice you could build a nest in, seemed to personify the city more perfectly.
A mist set in during a gondola journey that was longer than any of us expected. At first Signor Bon tried to put us up at the Hotel Vittoria in the Frezzaria where the rooms were 6 lire a night, but Darcy objected to its humbleness, notwithstanding the photographer’s plea, ‘But your Lord Byron stayed near by when he first came to Venezia. I thought—’
‘Don’t you be trying to get round me. The cheek of you! Somewhere better,’ said Darcy, marching stiff-legged back to the gondola and settling herself into it. Again, Signor Bon’s eyes searched out mine. I shrugged, hoping to save him the trouble of arguing with Darcy, and the inevitable humiliation that would follow the unpleasantness.
As our gondolas loped like long black wolves from palace to palace, the mist began to coat everything with an uncertainty that seemed thrillingly spiritual, as if a thousand delicate lamps were uttering ectoplasm like the famous lady mediums back in London. The water seemed to smoke and boil beneath us. The buildings steamed, dripping with this strange false cold heat, as if Venice were a Gothic Atlantis pulled suddenly from the freezing-hot depths. Gulls wavered in the thickened air. The mist chewed at painted walls, darkening the pale ones, bleaching the vivid.
The boat-bound Venetians made friends with the mist, singing crooning lullabies to it and holding aloft lanterns that made but tiny incursions of happiness into the gloom.
‘What is that caterwauling?’ demanded Darcy. ‘Is someone slaughtering a goat?’
‘We have our special fog songs,’ explained Signor Bon.
The photographer pointed out Ca’ d’Oro, which hosted a private well of fog inside its fretted coffer of a courtyard. The side canals were abysses of darkness, with just a few white ghosts of walls to bear witness to the finiteness of things. The Grand Canal was transformed into a tunnel. Even the prows of our own gondolas were blunted by the mist. And the empty palaces, which seemed to dominate the city, grinned like rows of skulls, their eyeballs dark on the brain.
By the time we had been rowed to another three establishments, we were creatures of the mist, our minds clouded with it, our lungs soaked with it, our hair darkly stained by it, our imaginations rife with it. Darcy was finally placated by a brocaded, balconied apartment at 90 lire in the Albergo Reale Danieli. Signor Bon’s face showed a mixture of amusement and pain. I commanded my own features to remain bland when he said, ‘I shall advise Signor Sardou of your final lodgement here.’
He waved up at the elegant staircase. Like Annora’s, his fingers were pallid – from constant immersion in the liquids of his trade, I guessed. I noticed that he stooped a tint, perhaps from habitually accommodating low doorways in Venice, or from passing so much time under the black-velvet hood of his photographic apparatus. I wanted to ask if I might see his studio, but he quickly bade us goodnight – addressing me alone in Italian. From the safe privacy of the Italian tongue, I longed to ask him how well he knew Alexander.
Instead, I asked, ‘How you come to speak such excellent English, Signor Bon?’
Making sure that I could follow him, he told me in simple slow words that he had learned my tongue from a priest who served the expatriate Church of England community. He had refined it by many conversations with the ‘anglosassone’ tourists who came to him as clients.
‘They want to be married to Venice for ever, in an image, so I suppose I am a priest myself,’ he smiled.
In English or Italian, his voice was never static. The words came out like the shine brushed into hair, a roughness shed at the point of delivery yet that still gave a sense of energy to the quiescence. There was a trapped hilarity inside it, even when he spoke gravely. Now, without changing his expression, he told me confidentially, ‘But I never had such a subject as your sister Darcy before. She makes one long for the tender manners of Attila the Hun. I would not like to watch her eating meat.’
Up in our private parlour, Oona remonstrated gently, ‘That seemed a rather hard introduction for Signor Bon, Darcy. He must think we are very spoiled, the way you carried on there.’
Mr Rainfleury added reproachfully, ‘I hope he does not reconsider his offer. It has put the Corporation to considerable expense to get you all here.’
‘In fact, the first place was acceptable,’ said Darcy, ‘but it was important to show this Bon-Bon how we are to be treated before he starts pointing that nasty black thing at us and blowing our heads off with its explosions.’
Alexander arrived within half an hour. His mouth was bent all out of shape, and even the sight of me did not bring a smile to it. No wonder he looked out of sorts, I reasoned indulgently. He must have longed to be the one to introduce me to the Grand Canal. Meanwhile I longed to tell him my polished impressions of Monet, Cézanne, Renoir and their debates with light and shade.
He listened coolly to my sisters’ laborious descriptions of his own city. He escorted us to a restaurant, making sure to brush his hands against my own at every possible opportunity, sending ripples of pins and needles up my arms which, surprisingly, did not spend themselves until they reached my breasts. He knew. He truly knew. I saw it in the beckoning shapes of his smiles. He suppered with us, ordering simple dishes in a sumptuous Italian. In his native tongue, his voice was elegant; the movements of his head subtly adjusted to accommodate its inflections.
Alexander and I exchanged a telegraph office full of communications under the cover of the drawing block
he set on the supper table. Silently, I forgave him for not meeting me at the station. Silently, he told me that he would make it up to me.
‘What do you think of the Swiney Godivas in Venice, Mr Sardou?’ chortled Mr Rainfleury, his poor creature of a moustache lurid with tomato sauce.
‘It suits them beautifully,’ smiled Alexander. ‘I see possibilities for them here.’
He slid his eyes over mine. His smile went trickling down my body, inside my clothes. And all parts south of my waist lurched and churned like water cleaved by a gondola.
There was little time for sightseeing – or Alexander’s possibilities – as Signor Bon desired to put us to work immediately the next day.
‘Wants to recoup all his old expenses at the Danieli,’ Darcy observed acidly, counting the gold Napoleons in her purse.
‘More likely,’ said Mr Rainfleury, ‘Bon doesn’t want the public glimpsing for free what he hopes soon to sell them printed in albumen on board.’
Nevertheless, we squeezed in a few hours of Venice early in the morning and late at night. Our hair tightly coiled in snoods, and our heads covered with hats, we were whisked by our laquais de place around Piazza San Marco and led over the Rialto Bridge to the squabbling market. Ida squealed at the fish still flailing on the stalls and crabs curling their red fists at her. The Doges’ Palace was fit for just half an hour of our time, and we covered the Accademia Gallery at a trot. As for more gondola trips, we were told ‘later’, in a mysterious voice by Signor Bon, who had succeeded in a negotiation with Mr Rainfleury, that Alexander might not be permitted to sketch while the photographer did his work.
Mr Rainfleury told us, ‘It seems the photography fellow has taken a dislike to Sardou’s portrait. He says he does not sell girls like Mr Sardou does, whatever that means.’
‘I’m sure—’ I commenced indignantly, and then stopped myself before Darcy could see my blush.
In the end, I was relieved that sketching was forbidden, for the work – the part dictated by Tristan and Mr Rainfleury, that is – would have made Alexander pity me, or despise me. Signor Bon’s own compositions were, however, a welcome revelation.