7

THE LIVING ROOM was spacious, with a large square window at the far end, overlooking the Lagoon. Light flooded in from the shadowless expanse of water outside, creating such plenitude that the white walls seemed permeated with it and the several polished metal sculptures in the room gleamed with reciprocal reflections.

Raikes had been at once aware of these gleaming perspectives though at first too busy with other impressions to register them fully – impressions mainly to do with the woman’s movements about the room as she got the drinks ready and brought them, vermouth for Wiseman, white wine for him. The wine was perhaps not quite as cold as it should be, she explained. It had been in the cellar, of course, but they had no refrigerator, they had no electricity. Sometimes they had ice delivered …

‘Now I must go and change and so on,’ she said. ‘You will think me rude. The fact is I stayed too long over my gardening. I did not forget that you were coming, but I forgot the time. And I thought my husband … But he is working still. I will not be long. There is someone else for lunch: Richard Lattimer – perhaps you know him?’

‘I have met him,’ Wiseman said.

‘He is here too, but perhaps he is in the studio with Paul. In any case I will not leave you alone for long.’

‘Remarkable woman, the way she manages,’ Wiseman said, when she had left the room. ‘It can’t have been easy, especially in the winter. Of course they can afford to have help now.’

Raikes nodded. ‘I would find these distinctly disturbing,’ he said.

‘The sculptures? They are all her, I believe, in one aspect or another. It seems that he has had no other subject since they married. It is quite touching, in a way.’

He was at it again, Raikes thought, composing a sentimental story. Wiseman seemed to take all the phenomena of the world on one plane only, including the evidence of obsessive vanity all around them.

For it was vain and it was obsessive, he insisted to himself, to use your living room as a showroom for your work. One or two pieces, yes; but he had counted nine disposed about the room at different levels, semi-abstract shapes, though all, as he looked more closely, derived from the nude female body. Only one of the pieces had a face, and the face was Mrs Litsov’s.

They caught the light, setting up in that long room a bewildering multiplicity of images, organic yet incomplete, the model only guessed at, fugitive, as if these forms had been caught at some moment of metamorphosis, line of shoulder or thigh, slopes of the breast, cleft of the buttocks, complex abdominal folds, subtle panels of the mons Veneris. Had Chiara Litsov been the model for all these, standing, kneeling, crouching, lying nude for him, supine or prone, hers the whole consummate shape these were the fragments of or clues to? Raikes sipped his cold wine, keeping these thoughts at bay. The work was erotic but there was nothing salacious in it: that was lost in the beauty of the moulding, the fugitive nature of the human likeness; wherever the eye paused that part could be dwelt on as pure form, quelling lewdness in the way Daphne’s change quelled Apollo.

‘That must be Lattimer’s boat then,’ Wiseman said.

‘Did you say you knew him? Of course, you know everybody.’

Contrary to his usual habit, Wiseman showed no pleasure at this remark. He said, ‘I’ve met him before. He’s an art dealer. He has a small gallery here, run by a man called Balbi, and another, bigger one in London. He specializes in sculpture – any period, any style, so long as it is good. He is supposed to have a fantastic eye. He’s rich, of course. He owns a house here in Venice, somewhere in Canareggio – not far from you. He has contributed very generously to the Save Venice Fund. Quite large sums. That is how I know him – he made his first approach through Unesco after the 1966 floods. I didn’t know he was handling Litsov’s work.’

‘Perhaps he isn’t,’ Raikes said. ‘Perhaps he’s just a friend.’

‘He’s not that kind of man. You’ll see what I mean, I think.’

At this moment, as if on cue, the door opened and a fair man in a well-cut grey suit and a noticeably beautiful yellow tie came in. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Has she left you on your own? I see you’ve got a drink at least. Oh, hullo, Wiseman.’

Until these last words Raikes had thought it must be Litsov himself, judging by the ease of manner, the evident familiarity with the house; though the elegance and the handsome, cold composure of the face had not seemed in keeping.

‘This is –’ Wiseman began, but before he could say anything more, the newcomer announced his own identity. ‘I am Richard Lattimer,’ he said, as if it were too important a matter to be left to Wiseman. His face had broken into a narrow smile – the features seemed too perfectly regular somehow for a wider one.

‘Simon Raikes,’ Raikes said. Lattimer’s hand was cold and his grip surprisingly strong, so much so that Raikes was conscious of having to exert a countervailing pressure in order to avoid being engulfed altogether. For a moment or two he looked directly into the other man’s pale blue eyes.

Then Lattimer moved to the table, took up the bottle of wine and looked at the label. ‘Orvieto ’67,’ he said. ‘Not a good year. Still …’ He poured out a glass, and Raikes watched him, struck by the quick unerring way in which he handled both bottle and glass, a deftness in which there was something respectful too, almost caressive …

‘Well,’ he said to Wiseman, ‘still helping to preserve our artistic heritage?’

Wiseman did not smile. ‘One does one’s best,’ he said. It sounded pompous – which Wiseman was not.

‘We were admiring the sculptures,’ Raikes said.

‘Marvellous, aren’t they?’ Lattimer said at once. Glass in hand he took a step forward and touched the nearest piece, which was the most naturalistic in execution, the armless torso with Mrs Litsov’s face. Lattimer ran a white, thick-fingered hand over the features and the breasts, showing the same caressive confidence of touch he had displayed with the bottle. The face was briefly obscured, then stared ahead, wide-eyed and serious, while the hand caressed her breasts, arousing a strange sort of recognition in Raikes which he could not for the moment understand. Being without arms made her seem curiously defenceless and exposed, an effect which Litsov had exploited brilliantly by his sensuous treatment of the breasts and nipples, the care he had taken to render the tension between the downward pulling weight of the flesh and the upsurge of life.

‘Litsov has genius,’ Lattimer said.

There was something definitely odd about Lattimer’s face, Raikes decided. It was too reposeful somehow, unnaturally so. Before he could speculate further Chiara Litsov re-entered the room, apologizing for the delay. She had changed into a pale-blue dress of some material Raikes, always vague in such matters, thought might be silk. It caught the light, shimmering as she moved towards them, becoming itself a reflecting surface among the metal ones there – it was oddly, to Raikes, as if on entering the room she had become at once included among the various versions of herself all around them.

‘Oh, there you are, Richard,’ she said. ‘You’ve introduced yourselves, I suppose? I hope he has been looking after you properly?’

‘Can I pour you a glass of wine?’ Lattimer said. ‘I’ve been in the studio talking to Paul.’

An immediate and unmistakable impression of familiarity was conveyed in this brief exchange. Lattimer seemed proprietorial almost. Probably his way always to seem so. But there had been something else in the tone, or the inflexion, something that sounded cautionary, or perhaps like a reminder of some kind.

‘He’ll be out soon,’ Lattimer said, looking directly at Mrs Litsov.

‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ she said. ‘Before we all starve to death.’

She returned Lattimer’s look for some moments, smiling, and again Raikes had the feeling that something more particular was being conveyed. Then she moved the smile across to Wiseman. ‘And how is your book?’ she said.

That she had remembered he was writing one visibly delighted him. In the warmth of her interest he lost his appearance of cherubic worldling and became eager, vulnerable even; and Raikes, seeing this transformation she had effected so effortlessly, was visited by a vague sense of premonition, gone as soon as felt.

He himself said little, able for the first time to look at Chiara Fornarini steadily, now that her attention was elsewhere. If he had been expecting some degree of high-bred frailty or aristocratic languor, he did not find it. Her face was wider at the temples and cheekbones than was consistent with strict proportion, and strongly moulded; the lips were full, well shaped, amused-looking. It was the eyes that were most remarkable, wide-set, with a slight upward slant, grey-green in colour, very striking against the dark hair and the light olive tint of the skin. It was a vivid face, consonant with the strength that was evident in the body, a strength seen as much in the grace of her movements as in the full limbs and straight shoulders.

Wiseman, in full flight now, was talking about the legend of St Ursula, explaining that in the accounts of her pilgrimage to Rome she was always said to have been accompanied by eleven thousand virgins. This error, which he was dealing with in his Byways, sprang from a misreading of the original inscription, the letter ‘M’ standing for martire, not mille, as was popularly thought. ‘It is eleven virgin martyrs, not eleven thousand virgins,’ Wiseman said. His face was glowing, his hair had somehow become dishevelled. ‘Even Pignatti,’ he said, ‘writing in 1958, falls into this same error.’

‘Well, but I have seen the paintings,’ Mrs Litsov said. ‘They are at the Accademia. If you go and look at the Carpaccios there, you will see that in his painting of this scene there are many more than eleven virgins kneeling with St Ursula at the Pope’s feet. There are not eleven thousand, admittedly, but he could hardly have put them all in.’

‘I was going to mention that,’ Wiseman said. However, he added nothing for the moment, seemed somewhat dashed in fact.

‘Perhaps a few tagged along,’ Raikes said. He met Mrs Litsov’s eyes. Something in their innocent steadiness told him at once that she was aware of Wiseman’s slight discomfiture, amused by it, and inviting him in as an accomplice. Suppressing all sense of disloyalty to Wiseman, he allowed himself to smile. The exchange of glances was over in seconds but it left Raikes feeling leagued with her.

Lattimer laughed suddenly, a rather barking laugh which did little to disturb the immobile set of his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she probably picked them up as she went along. On the swarming principle. She was the queen virgin, you know.’

‘I see the whole thing as what we would now call a demo,’ Mrs Litsov said. ‘It was a mass protest of virgins.’

‘No, no,’ Wiseman said, without smiling. ‘Carpaccio himself didn’t know. That is the whole point. That is the point I am making in my book.’

‘In that case, old chap, the mistake goes back a long way indeed,’ Lattimer said coldly. ‘The story of Ursula’s mission and martyrdom is told in The Golden Legend compiled by Jacobus de Voragine round about the middle of the thirteenth century. That’s two hundred years before Carpaccio’s time. He got the account from there.’

‘Quite so,’ Wiseman said, ‘but he wouldn’t have seen it in that version. Carpaccio couldn’t read Latin. There was an Italian version published in Venice in 1475. My whole point is that Carpaccio –’

But here Lattimer, obviously sensing he might lose the argument, deliberately and indeed brutally interrupted, launching into a lengthy disquisition on the various treatments of the subject in the late-medieval art, the fourteenth-century frescos of Tomaso da Modena at Treviso, Memling’s beautiful reliquary shrine in the Hôpital Saint-Jean at Bruges, both of which he had seen. His knowledge was remarkable, his memory too; and his fluency admitted no pauses. Wiseman sat flushed and silent.

Raikes could not remember having seen before, in the course of an ordinary conversation, such self-assertion, such disregard for the rights of others, as Lattimer was demonstrating now. He was shocked by it and it occurred to him to wonder why Mrs Litsov did not in some way intervene. He stole a glance at her but her face bore no particular expression. This would be a good time, he suddenly thought, to bring up the question that had brought him. All thoughts of poor Wiseman fled. ‘I don’t know if Wiseman told you,’ he said, leaning towards her and speaking quietly, ‘but I had an ulterior motive in coming to see you today.’

‘Ulterior motive?’

For a second or two Raikes met the serious eyes fixed on him. Again he was aware, not of scrutiny exactly, but a sort of speculation, as if something about him were being assessed. With a confused sense of turning the occasion into a compliment, he began, ‘If I had known, of course –.’ But this was wrong, it would seem patronizing. He stopped abruptly. Her eyes were on him still but he could see only the same cool interest in them. ‘There were one or two things I wanted to ask you about,’ he said.

Before she could reply a tall, fair-bearded man in a faded denim jacket came into the room. He did not approach anyone but stood quite close to the wall, looking at the visitors it seemed uncertainly or perhaps diffidently.

‘Here is the maestro,’ Lattimer said. ‘Now we can have some lunch.’

‘You remember Mr Wiseman, don’t you?’ Mrs Litsov said. ‘And this is Simon Raikes.’

‘How do you do?’ Litsov said, making no move to approach anyone. ‘There was something to finish,’ he said, looking at his wife.

‘When was there not?’ she said. ‘Well, we can go and have our food now. Maria has been waiting with it for quite a while.’

The dining room was reached through the door Litsov had entered by, then down a short length of passage. It was smaller, with the same roughcast walls. No sculptures in evidence here, Raikes noticed. Very little decoration of any kind. Various hors-d’oeuvres had already been set out: olives, prawns, aquadelle, fried squid. There was more of the Orvieto.

Litsov began talking immediately but not about anything that concerned his guests. He had not looked directly at any of them yet. ‘Richard has told me that Adriano is still out of action,’ he said, still looking at his wife. ‘He still has this glandular fever.’

‘That seems to be so, yes,’ she said. ‘But I understood he was getting better. Isn’t that so, Richard?’

‘He is definitely on the mend,’ Lattimer said. ‘He expects to be working full out again in a matter of days.’

‘It is nearly three weeks now,’ Litsov said. ‘I am sick of it.’

‘He will not entrust the casting of your work to anyone else.’ Mrs Litsov smiled. ‘It is a compliment, caro,’ she said.

‘That’s all very well,’ Litsov said. His voice was deep, with a note of irritation in it. ‘Meanwhile, no one casts my work,’ he said. ‘It is piling up and nothing happens, just excuses. I will not give him much longer. There are others on the mainland who can do the work as well as he can.’

Neither Mrs Litsov nor Lattimer replied to this, and their silence seemed to irritate Litsov further. ‘You think that I will do nothing,’ he said. There was definite anger now in his voice. ‘But you are wrong. I give him one more week.’

‘Everything will be all right,’ Lattimer said. ‘I will take care of it.’

Litsov brooded for some moments, looking down at the table. Then, perhaps sensing he had caused embarrassment, he looked up. With an obviously deliberate effort to be more sociable, he said, ‘You have dressed up for us today, Chiara, I see,’ and he smiled at her.

The smile destroyed his face more or less completely. In repose it was handsome, with the broad fair brows, strong nose, blue, prominent eyes, full beard below; but jaws and chin were fashioned on a smaller scale, belonged on a child’s face almost, and when the mouth smiled it collapsed into the beard, and only the white, voracious teeth survived. ‘It is nice to see you wearing a dress,’ he said. ‘Lately it has been trousers, trousers.’

‘I was surprised I could get it across my shoulders,’ she said. ‘I am developing muscles, Litsov, on this island.’

This was said without coquetry but the effect of her words was in some sort to focus the attention of the four men on the concealed mechanisms of her body as she sat there in the long-sleeved dress.

‘Muscles!’ Litsov moved his large head slowly as if this was a new thought for him.

Wiseman was merely arch. ‘I assure you,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t show to any marked extent.’ He turned a cherubic smile on her.

‘Where are they then, these mighty muscles?’ Lattimer demanded and beneath the assumed jocularity there was atavistic condescension. He looked at her with his narrow smile, his handsome, small-featured, immobile-seeming face – not so much composed as artificial-looking, Raikes thought. As if it were not quite his own … that was it, of course: Lattimer had undergone plastic surgery at some time or other; the skin of his face had been stretched.

‘You should show us,’ he said, in the same jocular tone. He glanced round at the others. Encountering Raikes’s gaze, his left eyelid flickered in a brief, incongruous wink. ‘Give us a chance to judge,’ he said.

It seemed to Raikes, who was sitting beside her and looking at her closely, that some slight shadow passed over her face – impatience, distaste, perhaps only resignation. It was gone in a second; her expression was again clear. She seemed about to speak, but at this point Maria came with a great dish of lasagne verde. Under cover of the polite business of serving and passing round he asked her about life on the island.

It had been hard at first, she said, and especially in the winter. Everything had been a problem to begin with. Fortunately there was good water. With children it probably wouldn’t have been possible. They had been lucky to find Maria, who came over from Treporti twice a week, weather permitting, and looked after them in all sorts of ways. Litsov of course was not practical at all. He had only been concerned to fit out the studio. She smiled as she said this, without hint of blame.

Raikes looked down the table, saw traces of Litsov’s un-pleasing smile, saw the large face revert to customary staring gravity – there was an official dignity and gloom about Litsov’s face, like that of a president on a foreign postage stamp.

‘The place was never intended for day-to-day living, I suppose,’ he said, looking back towards Mrs Litsov, nerving himself for the impact of her eyes. These had gold flecks on the iris, he had discovered, giving them a slightly tawny look.

‘No, it was a kind of shooting lodge,’ she said. ‘People used to come here to shoot ducks. Or you say duck, don’t you, in the singular? It belongs to my uncle, as a matter of fact – the island, that is. But it was my grandfather who came here. The family lived in the Veneto at that time. We had an estate near Castelfranco. My grandfather kept up the place while he lived, or so they tell me – I never came here then. They had parties here in my grandfather’s time, when he was younger. Some of those alleged hunting trips were quite orgiastic, I believe. That was in the seventies and eighties of the last century. My grandfather died when I was four and my uncle wasn’t interested much in shooting ducks, or having orgies presumably; anyway there was no money, everything had to be sold, my father went to Rome where he got a job as a bank clerk; no one came here any more except a few fishermen. Even the ducks don’t come any more, the motor boats drove them away. Still, Litsov and I got a rent-free house. We couldn’t have done anything without Richard. It was his idea in the first place. He had the whole place done up for us, practically rebuilt. He spent a fortune on it. He would have installed a generator if Litsov hadn’t taken a stand against electricity.’

Raikes nodded. Litsov had to be humoured, it seemed. However, Lattimer did not impress him as a philanthropist. If he had spent money it must be to get money back. Or had he more sentimental reasons? This was a curiously disagreeable thought, and Raikes shifted in his chair as if in physical discomfort at it.

‘What did you mean,’ she said suddenly, ‘before, when you spoke about ulterior motives?’

Raikes glanced round the table. It was a propitious moment. The other three men were talking, or rather Wiseman and Lattimer were – Litsov listened, head broodingly lowered.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought you might be able to help me.’ He began in a low voice to tell Mrs Litsov about his attempt to establish a connection between the Casa Fioret and the Madonna. He was aware that he was looking rather deeply into her eyes as he spoke but in the interest of the subject he felt no shyness at this. He told her about the account book he had found – though not the precise circumstances of his finding it – and the entry with the date so nearly corresponding to that of the Madonna’s installation in 1743, and the address, and the name Fornarini, how he had thought it possible that the statue had been kept there, in the house somewhere or in the garden, and transported from there to the church. He told her of his visit to the house, the present state of it, his disappointment. ‘I felt I was barking up the wrong tree,’ he said. Then he had discovered from his reading of Marco Barbaro that the Bishop of Venice, who had officiated at the installation, had been a Fornarini, was perhaps the one referred to in the notebook and so his hopes had begun to rise again, he was beginning to think there must be a connection. He spoke with a sort of fevered frankness, keeping his eyes on her face, deeply aware of her attentiveness.

‘And so,’ he said, ‘when Wiseman told me you were a Fornarini, I thought perhaps …’ Having reached this point he did not know how to proceed. What did he want from her? What did he expect? He could not have said, in any definite way. He wanted her to keep his hopes alive. ‘I thought you might be able to throw some light,’ he said at last.

Mrs Litsov shook her head in a way that seemed genuinely regretful. ‘I don’t know of any connection,’ she said. ‘You must remember that I have spent most of my life away from Venice. In Rome first and afterwards in London. And really I am not so interested in the past. Probably you think that is terrible.’

‘No, no,’ Raikes said, startled at the notion of fault in this radiant creature.

‘Even my own family,’ she said, and quite suddenly made the second gesture he was to remember from that day, raising her left shoulder and reaching across with the right hand to stroke her upper arm in a lingering, self-consoling way. There was something childlike about this movement, which touched Raikes, though out of shyness he pretended not to notice it.

‘Perhaps I got too much of it,’ she said. Evidently the gesture had been involuntary: there was no change in her voice or manner; nor was it cold in the room – there was a good fire burning. ‘Of course, there were always stories,’ she added after a moment.

‘What kind of stories?’

‘Well, for example, they say the men of the family have a special grace to produce male children.’

‘Males? I thought it was just children generally. It didn’t work a hundred per cent in your father’s case.’ He was aware of considerable gratitude that this was so.

‘I am the only girl, you know. In fact there were generally more boys than girls it seems. Then there is Francesco, who became a saint, there were a lot of stories about his goodness, and Jacopo, who was skinned by the Turks rather than become a Muslim, and Marcantonio, who was offered the crown of Naples but preferred to return to Venice and serve the State … The stories are always to their credit. It is just folklore really.’

‘That would be the Marcantonio who was Venetian ambassador to Naples early in the fifteenth century?’

‘Yes. Probably a complete gangster. You have been studying the family history then?’

‘I’ve been reading Marco Barbaro.’

‘I have an aunt in Rome, who is unmarried, she has all these books and papers, anything to do with the family.’ Mrs Litsov smiled. ‘She thinks of herself as the guardian of our name,’ she said. ‘I could write to her, if you like. She might know something.’

‘I don’t want to be a nuisance. I don’t even know whether there is any connection between the statue and the house. It would be more logical to look for a church.’

‘Oh, she would be pleased in any case, poor thing. She would be glad someone was showing an interest. The family papers are in America now, those that could be found. They were sold to Boston University long ago, to pay the rent, I suppose. But I will write to my aunt.’

Raikes hesitated for a moment, then he said rather awkwardly, ‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t say anything about this to anyone. I’m trying to pursue these inquiries privately, you know. I haven’t told anyone else about it, only you.’ Once again he became aware that he was looking at her too intently. She smiled and said, ‘You don’t want to see it in your friend’s Byways for example? Of course I will not say anything.’

‘It really is very good of you to help me.’ He would have expressed this feeling of gratitude at rather more length, had he not suddenly realized that silence had fallen on the table, that his face was too close to hers, his manner too confidential, that Litsov’s solemn gaze was on him.

He sat back. The need to seem relaxed and affable led him into an ill-considered speech. ‘I’d like to say how impressed I am by your work,’ he said to Litsov. ‘The sculptures gain so much strength from being together.’ He realized at once that this implied some reservation about the works considered individually, which had not been his intention. ‘Most impressive,’ he continued hastily, ‘this balance you strike between organic form and pure abstraction.’

Litsov’s face showed no gratification at this whatsoever; the solemnity of his features deepened if anything; and it was this perhaps, this failure to make a civil response, that began to annoy Raikes – coupled with a sense of his own clumsiness. ‘Deeply impressive,’ he said, still valiantly smiling.

‘All art tends to abstraction,’ Litsov said finally and magisterially. ‘The individual creature is only a means – a way through. We look at it and we dissolve it. It is submerged in the world of forms.’

‘Oh, no,’ Raikes said, combative warmth rising within him. ‘The individual is not submerged or dissolved. That is dangerous doctrine, I think. And it is a “she” in this case, I gather, not an “it”.’

‘Paul is speaking figuratively,’ Lattimer said, in his cold, deliberate voice. ‘Surely you can see that? He is speaking as a creative artist.’

‘You say that as if it meant the same as ex cathedra,’ Raikes said. He glanced at Mrs Litsov. She was regarding her husband closely, with an oddly speculative expression. ‘Many people,’ he said, ‘and among them creative artists, would take a contrary view, and argue that truthful adherence to the particular is the way to universality.’

‘One body cannot be all bodies,’ Litsov said. ‘That is –’

‘It is there I disagree,’ Raikes said quickly and warmly.

‘Self-evident,’ Litsov said, as if there had been no interruption. ‘I have adapted Plato for my own use. Let me remind you what he said, Mr Raikes. He said that when the artificer of any object reproduces its essence and virtue by keeping his gaze fixed on what is self-consistent and using that as a model, the object thus created is altogether beautiful. But if he looks towards the world of becoming and uses a created model the result is not beautiful.’

There was an impressiveness about this, uttered in Litsov’s rather deep voice and accompanied by slight movements of that massive head. It was obviously by way of being a credo, for one thing; and the archetypal resonance of the phrases for once made the man’s solemnity seem appropriate, rather than merely self-important. Then he looked towards his wife and smiled and his lower face collapsed once more and his teeth showed, naked and white. ‘I have used a created model,’ he said, ‘but I have kept my gaze fixed on what is self-consistent in it.’

He looked back at Raikes. The smile still lurked but there was now, suddenly but quite unmistakably, an offendedness in his expression which till then he had possibly been trying to dissemble. ‘You think perhaps that I belittle my subject?’ he said.

‘No one could think that, Paul,’ Lattimer said. ‘No one in his senses could think that.’

Raikes paused, unforgivably. He had not meant to go so far, but the challenge rendered him obstinate. And the lady was near.

‘No,’ he was beginning, ‘no, I don’t say that –’

Then Mrs Litsov spoke, in clear tones, looking at her husband. ‘Mr Raikes is not an artist,’ she said. ‘He cannot be expected to understand the creative process. Don’t forget, tesoro, that he is merely a restorer of other men’s work.’

These words, which wounded Raikes more than he could have thought possible, immediately restored Litsov to good humour. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘A restorer? I suppose mainly of works in stone … yes? That is why I like to work in bronze, the glory of changeless metal as William Butler Yeats has it. Polished bronze, especially. I am not interested in texture, not at all.’

Raikes could think of nothing to say. It was too soon to contemplate leaving. There was the coffee yet, another session in the living room, among the glory of changeless metal. Even before that, it seemed, there would be more to endure – Litsov had begun to speak again, and his tone now was condescending and assured:

‘Well, Mr Raikes, I used to think as you do; but everything in nature assumes autonomous and natural forms, trees, animals, insects. Why not art? Have you thought of it that way? Why should art imitate other orders of things, as to be like a bottle or a house? Art is a fruit of man and must take its own shape, just as other fruits do. Otherwise, what is it? I will tell you. Merely a substitute for nature, nothing else.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Wiseman said mildly. ‘It could be called a celebration of nature, couldn’t it?’

Raikes, seeing the beard turn towards this latest contestant, was profoundly thankful for the interruption, which he felt fairly sure Wiseman had contrived expressly for his sake – he had been feeling like a caned schoolboy who must still stand and listen to the headmaster’s homily.

However, the pain of the snub stayed with him for the rest of the visit. And though he behaved with what he hoped was proper poise, he addressed no more remarks directly to Chiara Litsov, nor looked at her oftener than he had to.