‘Is that so? Is your husband joining you on vacation?’
Frances looked out at the glittering rivers of light, the myriads of strangers, at the permanent impervious skyline of dome and spire. ‘No. He died eight months ago. And I'm not on vacation, I'm here because my son is in hospital here. He was hurt in the airport explosion.’
Ruth Bowers gave a kind of hiss. For a few moments she said nothing. Then, ‘Well, I guess you must think me really stupid, going on about vacations. One thing you can be sure of in this life, nothing's ever the way you think it is. I saw you on the boat, and back there in the hotel and I just had this impression of someone – well someone the sun shone on, if you see what I mean. You get to looking at people, when you're on your own. It's kind of nosy, I guess, but not all that much. I'm really sorry, Frances. How is your son?’
‘He's not very badly hurt. A broken leg, and some cuts.’
‘That's really rough, though, having a kid caught up in something like that. You must've been worried sick. I don't have any kids myself – not married, for that matter – and I often think I missed something there. Someone you carried around inside your body – it grabs me just to think about it. Is he the only one?’
An oil tanker was passing between the quay and the distant skyline of Giudecca. Frances watched its huge grey bulk blot out the dome of San Giorgio. ‘As a matter of fact he isn't my son. He's adopted. There's a girl, too, a bit older. She was adopted too.’
Ruth Bowers sighed. She gestured at the waiter. ‘If you'll excuse me, Frances, I'm going to buy us a couple more drinks. Oh my, this sure is my night for getting things wrong. But it's the same, I guess, isn't it, if you've had them from babies?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Frances. ‘It's the same.’ She tried to find her purse. ‘Look, please let me…’
‘Another time. You sit tight. You still look a bit rocky. You'd think they'd keep those darn great things out of the lagoon, wouldn't you? I read somewhere each of them carries enough crude oil to pollute twenty miles of coast-line. And from everything you hear this city's in enough trouble as it is. Did you see this booklet they have in the hotel about how they're appealing for…’
The tanker's silent passage extinguished the lights of the distant shore in sections, printing its shape upon the bright night. People passed and re-passed: singly, in groups, loitering, hurrying. It seemed amazing that there could be so many people, that the supply was endless, replenished every day, year in year out. The paving was worn smooth by feet, the joins between the stones almost obliterated. Probably, Frances thought, I walked along here with Steven, though I don't now remember. Maybe I have sat before in this exact spot, looking at the same skyline. Places are receptacles, that's all; they give nothing away, they don't record, they don't tell. They exist only in the head. In my head, this place is a white blown curtain, and water-noises, and Steven's voice, and my feelings. And now I see that there is more; all this was there then.
And with this knowledge there came a curious feverish resolve. I will learn this city, she thought, in the time that I am not with Harry at the hospital I will learn it, street by street. I will find in it that other time, those other days with Steven. It is all here, hitched to walls and paintings and the things we saw and smelled and heard, and I can get it back. I can have it again, hour by hour, and I don't care how much it hurts. I can reach out and take it back, and him with it.
‘Hey, I've lost you, haven't I? Excuse me, I always talk too much. How are you feeling?’
‘I'm sorry,’ Frances said. ‘I was in a daze, I'm afraid. But I do feel better now, thank you.’
‘Will you look at the time – nearly nine! My stomach's telling me that, too. I guess I'll go find somewhere to eat.’ Ruth Bowers hesitated. ‘I don't want to impose, but I think you could do with a meal too, Frances. Would you care to join me?’
‘Thank you. I'd like to.’
I have been here. I have seen this painting before. If I look hard enough, if I shut out now – these people, the noise, myself – I can bring back then. I remember the smell of this room, and the way the paintings have that hard bright glow. Steven said… Steven said something about looking at these huge pictures from the centre outwards… What did he say?
She stood in a crowd, in this hot room, and stared into the swirling tumultuous Annunciations and Resurrections and Calvaries and Ecce Homos. People weeping and people dying and people exulting and people praying; all those limbs and faces and shining flesh and flying garments; frame upon frame of it, gleaming like jewels in dark water, hanging there immutable before the crowds that come and melt away and come again with each new morning. For four hundred years eyes have stared at these paintings.
She sat on one of the benches at the side of the room. At this distance, the huge Annunciation became abstract, a swirling oval of light concentrating to a single central point. And the crowds ceaselessly shuffled before it, like the patient lines passing the coffin of some national hero, their heads turned for the allotted portion of time.
I don't remember all these people, back then. Were we quite alone here? Was Venice displayed just for us? Once, in a café, a man at the next table asked for the time; he spoke English, but was not English, and wore a fawn suit. In the hotel there was a French couple with children who ran about in the restaurant, knocking things over. So there were people.
What did Steven say, in here, looking at this picture? Think. Look long enough, and it will come back.
It does not come back. What comes, instead, is one of the confusing intrusive wisdoms of hindsight. The cloak of Christ, in the Agony in the Garden, is a rich ruby red and the colour, devoured by an eye that sees but does not observe, recreates another such wine-dark velvety splash, the wing of one of the chairs in the Putney house – a wing against which rests Steven's head, bent down over papers on his lap. He looks up, and the papers rustle under his hands. He says, ‘You've been crying.’ He shuffles the papers together. He says, ‘You must have children, darling, because if you don't you will go quietly nuts. So something has got to be done.’
She went out into the piazza. She passed from the shadow of an arcade into the sun and the heat stunned her. She stood looking around and for an instant, a worrying instant, could not think where she was, why she was there. She could have been dreaming; the buildings, the colonnades, the dome of a church, were like the fantasy landscape of a dream. The moment fled, and she knew again. That morning she had seen Harry, and he was more or less out of pain, and the doctor had said he might be able to walk with crutches in a week, but could not be moved until then. She was in Venice, and it was mid-afternoon, and she had in her hand a map and a guide-book.
She moved into the shade and looked at the map. She opened the guide-book, and read. Names on the pages quivered and set up answering vibrations in her mind. Did we not go there? Don't I remember that? Carpaccio, Donatello, Verrocchio, San Stefano, San Rocco, Santa Maria della Salute. She stared at the map, and the geometry of the streets and squares reeled and shimmered. She set off, across open spaces and down alleyways and over bridges. The city ensnared her like a web, a maze. When she tried to match her position to the lines and names on the map there seemed to be no possible relationship. What was, and what was said to be, were not the same. The crumbling fading landscape of arches and pillars and snatches of water and curving bridges and ever-shifting skylines was a stage-set, a tricksy deceptive palimpsest. Alleys furtively opened in walls that appeared blank; streets swung round corners into concealed squares; canals blocked her passage. She abandoned the map and simply wandered, digested by the city. She saw nothing that related in any way to that other time. Once, a statue halted her, setting up some reverberation, but when she looked harder she realized that it resembled a bronze of a horse and a rider in a London street.
She went into a church. At the entrance, a placard announced its date and listed its treasures. Inside, she sat for a moment on a chair, in the scented gloom; footsteps tapped and whispered on th
e marble floor. She got up and wandered from painting to painting; Madonnas and Christs and the patriarchal cloaked figures of biblical mythology. Each picture was a complex system of reference and meaning; it told a story. It assumed in the viewer an answering set of responses. If you did not know the language of Christianity these paintings would be meaningless; works of art, no more and no less. She found her own knowledge wanting from time to time. Who was Emmaus? The Maccabees? Saint Barbara? Above all, the tableaux, the faces, the emotions seemed to exist outside the straitjacket of time, to be as permanent and detached as natural landscape. Their power was aesthetic, the frozen grief or rejoicing upon the faces was as safely beyond actual sorrow or joy as were the bearers of those names on the tombstones in that London burial ground.
She stood before a triptych Virgin and Child and felt more utterly alone than at any point since Steven's death.
On the morning of the third day Frances tried to telephone Zoe. She had already done so once but, finding her out, had left a message on the answering machine. Now she again fumbled with the unfamiliar mechanism of an Italian phone-box. She dialled the international code and distant voices chattered at her. She had no idea where in the city she was; she had lost the map and discarded the guide-book. When at last Zoe's distorted recorded voice replied she left another message.
It must be the third day because of the date on the newspaper she had taken to Harry that morning. Otherwise, the time since she had been here had merged into a continuous present, exempt from the conventional divisions of day and night, eating and sleeping. She had returned to the hotel when she was too exhausted to go on wandering the city, slept and eaten when it occurred to her. The only fixed points had been her twice daily visits to Harry. She had sat by his bed for the prescribed time, had talked to him, had brought him the things he needed. He was something of a celebrity in the hospital, petted by the nurses and visited by the relatives of other inmates of the ward, who gathered around his bed smiling and pressing on him small gifts by way of chocolate, fruit and even flowers. An ambulant patient was teaching him Italian. He sat by Harry's bed, patiently enunciating, a huge amiable man stripped to a pair of pyjama trousers above which rose a torso blanketed with curly black hair. When Frances arrived he would rise, bowing and grinning, and pad away again to his own bed.
‘You're all right here, then?’
‘It's O.K. The doctor says I'll have another X-ray tomorrow and then they'll know when I can go.’
‘Yes. I've seen him too. He thinks possibly at the weekend. I'm going to book flights in case.’
She talked to him mechanically, hardly knowing what she said, hearing her own voice as though it were someone else's. From time to time she would see him suddenly, with a sharper awareness, and was astonished by him: his lanky adult body, his man's voice, his laconic remarks. Once, she said, ‘Do you remember that time you got stuck on a cliff in Cornwall?’ Harry stared for a moment, blankly: ‘Oh God – yes, vaguely. I'd had a fight with Tab. It was a bit of machismo stuff. How old was I?’ ‘About ten.’ ‘I remember thinking Dad would give me a roasting but all he said was, “That was a pointless thing to do, as you presumably now realize.” Dad never went in for recriminations, did he?’ ‘No, he didn't.’
Harry frowned. He lay staring at the ceiling and then flashed her a sideways look in which lurked embarrassment, compunction and loss of words. He said, ‘Don't feel you need hang around here, Mum. I mean, why don't you have a look at Venice while you're at it.’ He turned away again and his black hair which, now, someone had washed, lay in strands upon the pillow.
As thus, then, it stands in quills against the electric blue nylon blanket in which he lies swathed in a plastic carry-cot in the office of the adoption society to which they have driven, almost in silence, through south London. Relax, said Steven, once, putting out a hand, laying it for a moment on her knee, relax for goodness sake. You're as stiff as a poker, I can feel it. You're going to fetch a baby, not stand trial for murder. And she looks down into the carry-cot where this infant, this alien infant, is fast asleep, snuffling gently like an asthmatic dog. She looks at the dark quills and, when suddenly he turns his head, the soft dent in the back of his neck invokes in her a sensation of internal dissolution not unlike sexual desire. She wants to pick him up and clamp him to her breast. She knows that she does not give a damn whose he is or where he comes from. She stares down at him and behind her Steven and the adoption society lady are talking and she does not hear a word they say.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I've been here before. Dad and I spent our honeymoon here. Surely we must have talked about it…’ And Harry, embarrassed again, replies that oh yes, sure, he'd forgotten, but anyway… I suppose I'll never get to see the Doge's Palace and all that now, he went on, the whole point of coming here…
‘You've got all your life,’ said Frances. ‘Venice will continue.’
The process of transition from one place to another was as mechanical as her conversations with Harry. She was in the hospital, and then somehow she was back in the city, walking, sitting at a café, passing through arcades from flaring light to deep shadow. She went in and out of the hotel, waited for the lift, locked and unlocked the door of her room.
On one of these visits she was aware of the American woman, Ruth Bowers, beside her. ‘I'm sorry?’
‘I just wondered if you'd care to meet up for a meal later.’
‘Oh,’ said Frances, confused. ‘How nice – yes, well, maybe.’ She stared round the hotel lobby. In locked display cases were examples of Venetian glass: tormented structures of extreme ugliness – animals, fluted vases, encrusted bowls. She saw them with great intensity – their boiled sweet colours, the twists and pleats and bubbles of the glass. Like the rest of the physical world, they had the sharpness of accessories in dreams; she was acutely aware of sight and sound. The world seemed to glow and roar around her. ‘For lunch, you mean?’
‘Frances,’ said Ruth Bowers. ‘It's past four o'clock in the afternoon now. Look, dear, I don't want to pry, but are you sure you're all right at the moment. I passed you in the piazza this morning and you seemed kind of dazed.’
‘I'm fine,’ said Frances. ‘Truly.’ She achieved, from somewhere, a smile, a brisk reassuring smile. ‘Enjoying the sights. Harry's getting on well, they say. Do let's meet up tomorrow.’ And smiling still she left Ruth Bowers, who watched her go, seeing a woman with unkempt hair, dark pouches under her eyes and a crumpled skirt.
At some point that evening, when Frances was sitting at a café in one of the smaller and more hidden squares, she knew that she had been here before, on this precise spot. She looked up at the floodlit façade of a church and knew that that same arrangement of pink and apricot light was lodged within her head, the accompaniment to Steven's voice asking if she would like to go to a concert. She is wearing a pink striped dress; they have eaten a delicious meal; from time to time, with tranquil pleasure, she wonders if she is pregnant. She looks up at this glowing floating church and Steven asks if she would like to go to a concert. And the whiff of all this hung still in the square as she had known it would if only she searched long enough. The public place became private, hers alone, and she sat there until the peace that she had won tipped suddenly back into restless uncertainty. The waiter, his eye on the solitary woman who had sat so long with a single drink, saw her rise in sudden agitation and watched her hurry away, one drab foreign tourist among many.
She telephoned, and again Zoe was not there. She left a message, a bleak sentence delivered with painful urgency: ‘What colour were Steven's eyes?’
On the morning of the fourth day Ruth Bowers began to follow Frances through the streets of Venice. She trotted some twenty or thirty paces behind, weaving deftly through the crowds, and at the points when she thought Frances might turn and see her she would stop to stare in a shop window, or study the details of a building. In fact, these ruses were quite unnecessary, as she suspected: Frances was seeing nothing.
; In London, Zoe, returning to her flat, pressed the switch of her answering machine before pouring two glasses of whisky, one for herself and one for Eric Sadler. When Frances's voice came through, first once and then – after another message from someone else – again, Zoe put down her glass and stood staring at the machine. She listened once more to the messages. She said, ‘I knew I should have gone with her.’
She looked at Eric and said, ‘I have this blasted assignment in Edinburgh tomorrow’, and Eric, a big man with grizzled hair and the sagging belly of the desk-bound scowled for a moment in thought and then said, ‘Hang on, lovey, didn't you say that pal of yours – what's-his-name, the musical guy – didn't you say he was in Venice?’
‘Morris!’ cried Zoe, ‘You clever sod. Dead right – he was going there to lecture to something or other.’
There was something she should do, but she could not think what it was. Some obligation that tugged like the reality lying beyond the compulsive world of a dream. She walked out into the morning knowing that there was some person she should visit, with whom she was concerned. Standing in the drumming heat of the piazza she knew suddenly that it was Harry, that she was here in Venice with Harry, but she no longer remembered why, or where he might be. She was in a condition of juddering nervousness. The calm grey state of grief had gone and in its place had come a jagged anxiety bordering on panic; her legs felt weak and she found herself constantly holding on to things – balustrades, the backs of chairs – as though she were physically infirm and might fall. She walked through streets and squares and saw nothing: the houses and churches and canals rolled by like stage-sets. She was obsessed, isolated, locked within herself, in feverish pursuit. She knew that something disastrous was happening to her, that possibly she was going mad, and she knew also that if she ceased for one moment to think about Steven, to carry him with her in her head, she might lose him. He was dead; he existed only in recollection; when recollection ceased even that tenuous existence would be gone. A name, no more. Like the host of names on the white tombstones of Bunhill Fields burial ground; the silent army beneath the soil.