Athena (9 page)

This time Francie drove, with the dog on guard beside him and Morden and me in the back. Morden was silent, sunk in himself with his chin on his chest and his arms
tightly folded as if he were strapped into a strait-jacket. What was I thinking now? Still nothing. Is that not strange? I never cease to wonder at my capacity for passive participation, if participation is the word. As if just being there were itself a force, a kind of inertial action requiring only my presence for it to operate. To make sense of this flow of happenings that was carrying me along like a leaf on the flood I would have had to stop everything and step out of the picture altogether and stand back on some impossible, Archimedean platform in space and view the spectacle as a completed whole. But nothing is complete, and nothing whole. I suppose that is why deep down I have never been able fully to believe in reality as it is described by the science of physics, with its moments of motionless and lucid insight, as if it could be possible to take a cross-section of the moving world and put it between glass slides and study it in perfect stillness and silence. No, no, flux and flow, unstoppable, that’s all there is; it terrifies me to think of it. Yet more terrifying still is the thought of being left behind. Talk is one way of keeping up. Is that not what I’m doing? If I were to stop I’d stop.

On a newsagent’s stand the noon editions, in headlines three inches deep, were announcing the first of the murders.

‘Look at that,’ Morden said and clicked his tongue. ‘Terrible.’ He sat back in the seat and let his gaze drift upward dreamily. ‘Who was that chap,’ he said, ‘that stole that picture from Binkie Behrens and killed the maid when she got in his way?’ A row of shops with delivery vans, dogs, defeated-looking women pushing prams; how little I know of what they call the real world. ‘Ten or twelve years ago it was,’ he said. ‘Anyone remember?’

I kept my eyes on the passing streets. I have such a hunger in me for the mundane.

‘Some name beginning with M,’ Francie said and his shoulders shook.

‘That’s right,’ Morden said. ‘Montagu, or Montmorency, something like that.’ He tapped me lightly on the knee. ‘Do you recall? No? You were away, maybe – you’ve been away for a long time, haven’t you?’ He brooded, pretended to brood. ‘A Vermeer, was it, or a Metsu? One of those.
Portrait of a Woman
. Lovely thing. Hit her on the head with a hammer, whack, like that.’ He turned to me again. ‘Ever been to Whitewater House, the Behrens place?’ he said. ‘Magnificent. The pictures! You should go. Take a day trip. Do you good.’ He heaved himself up until he was sitting sideways on the seat and examined me critically. ‘You’re very pale, you know,’ he said. ‘Cooped up too much, that’s your trouble.’

I began to talk about Aunt Corky, her history and present status, the nursing home, the Haddons. Babblebabblebabble. Why Aunt Corky? I have few topics, when all is said and done. Morden let me go on and when I had straggled to a stop he sat up and rubbed his hands and said he wanted to meet her. ‘Francie,’ he cried, ‘turn the car, turn the car!’ He waved aside my weak-voiced protests. He was enjoying himself. Soon we were bowling northwards along the coast road. The tide was out and the sun was resplendent on the mudflats and the verdant algae. A heron stood on a rusted spar with wings spread wide. ‘Flasher,’ Morden said and laughed. Presently his mood turned again and he became lachrymose. ‘I have no family, you know,’ he said. ‘I mean real family: aunts, uncles, brothers, that kind of thing.’ He turned and to my alarm seized me by the wrist and peered searchingly into my eyes. ‘Have you a brother?’ he said. I looked away from him. Yes, just like me, a sentimentalist and a bully. This was awful. Francie rolled down the window and leaned out his elbow and began to whistle. The car climbed the hill road and at last we were pulling up at the gate of The Cypresses. ‘This it?’ Morden said, peering. I was picturing Mr Haddon’s face as Morden strode in shouting
for Aunt Corky. But Morden had lost interest in my aunt and had already plunged back into himself again and sat looking off, dead-eyed and frowning. Then as I was starting to get out of the car he reached forward quickly and caught me by the wrist again and again demanded to know if I had a brother. No, I told him, eager to be away, no, I had no family. Searchingly he gazed into my eyes. ‘A sister?’ he said. ‘No one?’ He slowly nodded. ‘Same as me,’ he said; ‘an orphan.’ Then he let go of me with a wave and I stumbled out on to the road and the car roared away. I stood blinking. I felt as if I had been picked up and shaken vigorously before being tossed negligently aside.

Aunt Corky had got religion. In her hospital clouts she sat up in bed in her big room and talked ecstatically of God and salvation and Father Fanning (I suppose we shall have to meet him, too, before long). I did not mind. Her voice was a soothing noise. I wanted to crawl under the covers with her and beg her protection. I was shaky and breathless and my legs felt wobbly, as if I had scampered the last few yards of the tightrope and were clinging now to the spangled pole in a sweat of rubber-kneed relief with the vast, dusty darkness yawning beneath me; presently I would have to retrace my quaking steps, back, back to where Morden stood waiting for me in his tights and his acrobat’s boots, grinning his dare-devil grin; but not yet. Aunt Corky’s breakfast tray was on the bedside locker: a porridge bowl with bent spoon, a smeared cup and mismatched saucer, a charred crust of toast. When she stopped talking I hardly noticed. How tired I was suddenly. She peered at me closely, frowning. ‘You,’ she said, and poked me in the chest, ‘what is the matter with you? You look as if you have seen a ghost.’ She was right; an all too familiar revenant, the ghost of an old self, had risen up before me again. If only there were a deed poll by which past deeds might be changed.

3.
Pygmalion
(
called
Pygmalion and Galatea
) 1649
Giovanni Belli (1602-1670)

Oil on canvas, 23 × 35 in. (58.4 × 89 cm.)

Belli is unusual in that he represents a reversal of the traditional direction of artistic migration, being an Italian who moved north. Born in Mantua, he is known to have studied for a time in Rome as a young man, probably as a pupil of Guido Reni (1575-1642), whose influence – less than benign – is clearly detectable in the works of the younger painter. We next hear of Belli in the year 1640 in a catalogue entry by the dealer Verheiden of The Hague, where he is referred to as ‘
Joh. Belli ex Mantova, habit. Amstelodam’
. Why this quintessentially Italian (southern, Catholic, death-obsessed) painter should have settled in the Low Countries is not clear. Certainly, from the evidence of his work, with its highly worked, polished textures and uncanny, one might almost say macabre, atmosphere, it seems it was not admiration for the serene genius of Dutch painting in the Golden Age that drew him northwards. He is an anachronistic, perhaps even faintly absurd figure, displaced and out of step with his time, an exile in an alien land. His work is marked by the inwardness and isolation of a man who has distanced himself from the known, the familiar, and betrays a hopeless yearning for all that has been lost and abandoned. His concern
with the theme of death – or, rather, what one critic has called ‘life-in-death’ – is manifest not only in his characteristically morbid choice of subject matter but in the obsessive pursuit of stillness, poise, and a kind of unearthly splendour; a pursuit which, paradoxically, imparts to his work a restless, hectic quality, so that the epithet most often applied to it – inaccurately, of course – is ‘Gothic’. This constant effort of transcendence results in a mannered, overwrought style; what Gombrich summarises as critical attitudes to Guido Reni might also be applied to Reni’s pupil, that his work is ‘too self-conscious, too deliberate in its striving for pure beauty’. In the
Pygmalion
this self-consciousness and desire for purity, both of form and expression, are the most obvious characteristics. We are struck at once by the remarkable daring of the angle at which the couch is placed upon which Pygmalion and his awaking statue-bride recline. This great crimson parallelogram lying diagonally across the painting from the lower right to upper left corners gives a sense of skewed massiveness that is almost alarming to the viewer, who on a first encounter may feel as if the room in which he is viewing the picture has tilted suddenly. Against the blood-hued brocade of the couch the ivory pallor of the awaking statue seems a token of submissiveness: here ‘Galatea’ (the name does not occur in any version of the myth in classical literature and in this context is probably an invention of Renaissance mythographers) is more victim than love-object. How strikingly this figure displays itself, at once demure and abandoned, sprawled on its back with left knee flexed to reveal where the smooth ivory of the lap has dimpled into a groove, and the right arm with its still bloodless, slender hand flung out; is it the goddess’s inspiration of life that is convulsing these limbs, or are these the paroxysms of fleshly pleasure that the half-incarnate girl is experiencing already and for the first time? And is Pygmalion leaning over her the better to savour her sighs, or is he drawing
back in consternation, appalled at the violence of this sudden passion he has kindled? The shocking gesture of his hand seizing upon the girl’s right breast may as easily be a token of his fear as of his desire. Likewise, the gifts of shells and pebbles, dead songbirds, painted baubles and tear-shaped drops of ambergris that lie strewn in a jumble before the couch seem less ‘the kind of presents,’ as Ovid says, ‘that girls enjoy’ than votive offerings laid at the altar of an implacable deity. With what obsessive exactitude has the artist rendered these trifles, as if they are indeed a sacrifice that he himself is making to Venus, whose great, smooth, naked form hovers above the two figures on the couch, dwarfing them. In this portrayal of the goddess – impassive, marmoreal, lubriciously maternal – can clearly be seen the influence of the mannerists, in particular the Bronzino of such works as
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
. The overall tone of ambiguous sexuality is slyly pointed up by the triple dancing tongues of flame rising from the sacrificial pyre that burns on the little moss-grown mound visible in the middle distance in the upper right-hand corner of the scene. However questionable they may be in terms of taste, it is in such subtle touches rather than in the larger gestures of this phantasmal and death-drunk work that, to quote Gombrich again, Belli’s ‘quest for forms more perfect and more ideal than reality [is] rewarded with success.’

What affects me most strongly and most immediately in a work of art is the quality of its silence. This silence is more than an absence of sound, it is an active force, expressive and coercive. The silence that a painting radiates becomes a kind of aura enfolding both the work itself and the viewer as in a colour-field. So in the white room when I took up Morden’s pictures and began to examine them one by one what struck me first of all was not colour or form or the sense of movement they suggested but the way each one suddenly amplified the quiet. Soon the room was athrob with their mute eloquence. Athrob, yes, for this voluminous, inaudible din with which they filled the place, as a balloon is filled with densened air, did not bring calm but on the contrary provoked in me a kind of suspenseful agitation, a tremulous, poised expectancy that was all the more fraught because there seemed nothing to expect. As I worked I talked to myself, only half aware that I was doing so, putting on voices and playing out dialogues under my breath, so that often when I finished for the day my head resonated with a medleyed noise as if I had been since morning in the company of a crowd of garrulous, mild lunatics. The room too
was disorienting, with its cramped wedge shape and single, disturbingly square window and invisible door. It’s a wonder I did not go off my head in that first period of solitude and unremitting concentration (perhaps I did?). I could have worked elsewhere in the house, for the place had many big empty airy rooms, but it never occurred to me to shift. I had Francie help me (he was less than gracious) to carry up an old pine table from the kitchen on which I set out my reference books, my powders and potions and glass retorts (I exaggerate), and unfolded on their green oilskin cloth the tools of my craft: the tweezers, scrapers, scalpels, the fine sable brushes, the magnifying glass and jeweller’s monocle; some other time, perhaps, I shall essay a little paean of praise to these beautiful artefacts which are an enduring source of quiet pleasure and consolation to me. So see me at play there just as in the days of my glowing if not quite gilded youth when it pleased me to pretend to be a scholar. Then it was science, now it is art.

I have considered many things since your going, and I have come to some conclusions. One is, that I was lost that radiant Florentine morning in the infancy of the
quattrocento
when the architect Brunelleschi disclosed to his painter colleagues the hitherto unrealised laws of perspective. Morally lost, I mean. The thousand years or so before that epochal event I think of as a period of deep and dreamless slumber, when everything moved in enfolding curves at a glacial pace and the future was no more than a replay of the past; a long, suspended moment of stillness and circularity between the rackety end of the classical world and the first, fevered thrashings of the so-called Renaissance. I picture a kind of darksome northern Arcady, thick-forested, befogged and silent, lost in the glimmering, frost-bound deeps of immemorial night. What calm! What peace! Then came that clarion dawn when the architect threw open his box of tricks and Masaccio (known to his contemporaries, with prescient and
to me gratifying accuracy, as Clumsy Tommaso) and his henchmen clapped palms to foreheads in disbelief at their own short-sightedness and got down to drawing receding lines and ruined everything, spawning upon the world the chimeras of progress and the perfectibility of man and all the rest of it. Illusion followed rapidly by delusion: that, in a nutshell, is the history of our culture. Oh, a bad day’s work. And as for the Enlightenment …! How, fed on these madnesses, could a man such as I be expected to keep his head?