The Remedy (30 page)
“I’m certain!” he exclaims, time after time, and so he is. He feels as if he’s extemporizing a love poem, a paean to the attractions of Mimosina Dolcezza, a sadly overdue tribute, one he is ashamed not to have delivered before. He wishes she could hear him. She would not feel unappreciated now.
He is growing excited. This is the closest he has been to her for days. Lacking her substantial presence, he’s hungry for her image.
But when Cecilia Cornaro finally drops her charcoal and turns the easel to face him he sees a face that bears only a glancing resemblance to that of Mimosina Dolcezza.
The face still strikes him as familiar, though. For there is some glancing resemblance in it to Tom. Then again, the girlish softness of the lips to make it look—fleetingly—and with the utmost flattering—a little like Pevenche too.
“I suppose I’ve made her too young and too plump,” says Cecilia Cornaro regretfully. “That’s what usually happens when I have to do it this way.”
She dabs a disfiguring shadow under one eye in a way that is not infused with kindness.
“Either that or you were not telling me the entire truth about her,” she accuses.
He does not trust himself to speak. It seems that his earlier words have betrayed not just his love for the actress, but also his other preoccupations, Tom and Tom’s daughter. He should do her the honor of an explanation, but his tongue is tied.
The artist must have her dollop of praise or blame, and Cecilia Cornaro is growing impatient.
“So I have monstered her then?” she asks waspishly.
Valentine recovers himself enough to make noises of protest.
“Shall you take it with you? I thought not.”
The girl is angry. He sees the color in her cheeks and remembers that Tom had told him one more thing about her: that Cecilia
Cornaro is endowed with what the Venetians call the
lingua biforcuta
, a famously sharp tongue. He quails now, thinking of all the lacerating things she might say to him in his weakness and confusion.
She’s not the kind to whom I’ll be singing all my sorrows.
She says succinctly: “If you must know, if
this
is your mistress, then she has deceived you. She has only pretended to be a Venetian actress. Perhaps it is not the only thing she has pretended, eh,
Signore?”
Valentine flinches and bows his head.
Cecilia Cornaro seems a little ashamed of her sharpness. More kindly, she advises, “Better go back to London, Signor Greatrakes. There’s nothing for you here.”
The woman in the picture is not his lover, and the moment turns the tide for him. He scurries back to his rooms, orders his things packed up, bids farewell to the bemused
truncheoni.
He makes a final round of all those studios and workshops that shall be involved in the preparation of the Venetian nostrum, and shakes hands until his fingers ache. When he tells his colleagues of his imminent departure, he is roundly embraced, and the warmth of human skin closed around his own is almost too sweet to bear. One last time, he watches the lovers in the neighboring building, his tears sliding down the window pane. He has never been so depleted in his spirits. He is bitten with desire for home.
He is not so much homesick for unlovely Bankside as wearied from being humbled by Venice’s beauty. He is worn out by her incessant seductions, humiliated that she takes him so cheaply even in the midst of his preoccupations. A lithe curve of the Grand Canal, the rich mew of a violin behind a shutter, the sun emblazoning the
fern
of a gondola—and his heart turns over, helpless and flabby as any Grand Tourist’s. He is denatured here. He cannot think properly. In London, his brain will be restored, and perhaps his heart will gradually mend.
He is floundering. As he makes his farewell rounds, clouds are strewn like dirty bandages around a feverish bruised sky. The air is gross and thickening for a shower. The stone pillars are already
sweating droplets, not waiting for the rain to come. And in the canals the water quivers and spasms rather than flows, as if someone had prepared and poured into them a gelatinous sauce of squid ink.
And surely all the belfries in Venice have been tuned to furious, sawing tragedy by the red priest Vivaldi—how else could the bells play on his spirits as they do?
In disappearing, Mimosina Dolcezza has burst not just the delicate structure of their romance but has revealed him to himself as a man who knows not how to love or be loved, an accomplished side-stepper, a flim-flam man. How exquisite is her revenge on him for his neglect—had she but the wit to know it. His happiness has melted like foam, as he now realizes, being just so insubstantial. He threw his whole heart into her lap. But she could not know it: that doll’s face, that doll’s heart, a little mechanical device that knows nothing of the dark side of passion, and whose ticking can be quickened only at the sight of simple love in a man’s face, of lovely gowns, at the glitter of ice on the Thames and snowdrops in Hyde Park.
Time to go home.
There is one duty he must perform before he leaves.
To conclude and make an end of this.
For the first time Valentine forces himself to walk through the fish market to the place where Tom died. Until this moment, he could not bear to do so. Now he has fallen so low in that the sense of loss cannot be made worse. It is a needful part of the so-far botched investigation to examine the scene of the crime. He has been absurdly neglectful in not doing so before. To make it more bearable he chooses to go there not in the dead of night, as Tom did, but in the bustling hours of the morning.
The promised storm has not delivered its relief.
Instead it is another azure day, pleasant and charming in inverse proportion to his spirits. The sky is dotted with just enough clouds to charge the heart of a landscape painter with delight. Gondolas are furrowing the grass-green water, on which the sunlight crackles like toffee.
He is not walking for his recreation, he reminds himself. To help him concentrate, he has hung Tom’s satchel over his shoulder a light but painful weight. At the last minute he had rifled the cupboard for the silk chemise and pushed it inside the satchel.
He sets off across Campo San Silvestro, turns left down Calle del Stivaleto, and right, left again. Before he even sees the market, the sudden reek of fish makes him blink, not just for its own salty pungency but because of the phrase he cannot forget.
Valentine has reached the glistening trays of the market. It is an unbearable thought, but it flickers in his mind at the sight of each different fish, each cod, each barbel, each crab, each eel.
Was it this one?
His back is rigid with the misery of it all. He walks stiffly to the bridge at the Riva de l’Ogio and leans over its parapet to the concealed corner beneath where he knows Tom’s body was found.
And he recoils, for there lies below him just one limp mackerel, its belly unseamed and its viscera taken by a gull. His eyes skitter away from the fish. He forces himself to examine the pale stone on which it lies, all the while afraid to see anything that might remind him too accurately of Tom.
But he cannot face it. His whole body cries out for flight.
And he’s breathing fish, slipping on fish scales, tormented by the dead mackerel. The shouts of the fishermen make him tremble. They are loud and, it seems, violent. Even the screaming colors of the fruit are hurting his feelings. He feels his heels pursued by the wheels of the fishermen’s carts. The satchel slaps against his hip and a foam of lace spills out of a corner of it.
The reflections in the water have stolen a fierce red from a wall at one side. It looks as if blood is still pulsing into the canal.
It’s more than a body can bear.
Yet he cannot help gazing at the stone pavement by the canal, and it’s impossible not to see Tom’s form there, especially now that he has a real Bankside memory of that coffined corpse, flowering with blood at the heart, to superimpose over the damp, blank stone he sees now. Dimly, and for the first time, he recalls that there were no wounds to the front of the chest.
So why should Tom bleed from his heart?
It is too much for him. Valentine stumbles away, unilluminated. He almost runs back to his apartments, where he approaches the window and fixes his nose, hoping to see the lovers. They have vanished and their room is, for the first time, ruffled and untouched, as if they had never existed.
He is on his way back to London within the day.
Valentine Greatrakes, on the gondola to Mestre, turns his head back for a moment to see the towers of Venice rising behind him, sharp and black against the boiling colors of the sunset. The next moment evening wraps the town conclusively in mist, as if hiding a malign surprise. In this tricksy light he feels unsafe, and stubs his fingers against his windpipe. He senses that the city is truly empty of Mimosina Dolcezza, but he cannot renounce the idea that she is something of it. In London he has the means for more detailed inquiries, both about her and about Tom.
Anyway, he has left Pevenche alone for far too long.
“Small notice of poor me,” her usual phrase for neglect, is one that now rings in his ears. Strange, surpassingly strange, that he has not heard from her these past weeks. Only one communication, that arrived in Venice just the day after he did, and that a poignant little note of just seven words. They are easy to remember, like any matter inscribed on a flinching conscience. Pevenche had written just this, and not even signed it:
“No inquiring after poor me at all.”
An Hysteric Julep
Take Waters of Black Cherries, Mugwort, Pennyroyal, each 3 ounces; of Bryony compound 1 ounce and a half; Tincture of Castor half an ounce; Oil of Amber (ground very well together with white Sugar, 1 ounce) 24 drops, mix.
This and other fetid Medicines, take off Hysteric Fits, by handling the Spirits roughly, and driving and dispersing ’em … the best Course is, to send such a stern Remedy among them, as may use severe Discipline, and lash and scourge them till they are glad to leave their Disorders, and run to their proper Posts, and fall to their Charge again. But this Medicine is not equally agreeable to all, for we meet with some, in whom Oil of Amber raises such abominable fetid Belching, and makes them so sick, that they cannot possibly put it away.
I knew without a doubt that he was with his “Mimosina Dolcezza” all this time. I was as solid on this point as a graven image. What else would have kept him in Italy so long?
I was careful not to mention her name if I asked Dizzom when Uncle Valentine would be returning. I let him bore me to conniptions with some fairy tale about a nostrum that needed a great deal of research in Venice. As if the stupid bottle were not going to be filled with the usual farrago of herbs, chocolate, and intoxicating spirits all bound together with some impudence and a spot of Uncle Valentine’s ticklesome puffery.
Oh indeed?
I drawled, feeling twenty miles meaner than a yellow dog, for poor little Dizzom flinched and ducked his head, the way he used to when he spoke with my Pa; the way most people did when they spoke with my Pa.
Twice a week Dizzom came to the Academy with a little carpetbag of remedies for my moody bowel and imperative bladder. Some were delicious. Others had unladylike effects, a bit of hard luck for the girls who shared the after-dinner port in Mistress
Haggardoon’s parlor. I noticed that attendance of this previously coveted occasion was dropping down at a great rate.
Observed I to Mistress Haggardoon, “The smaller, the more select, y’know”
London and Venice, January 1786
Take Confectio Hamech, powder’d Scammony, each 2 drams; Euphorbium 16 grains, make it into a Mass like Paste, out of which form longish Pellets to be thrust up the Nose, and to be kept an hour with a Muffler.