6

CROUCHED AGAINST THE Madonna’s pelvis, through the dust-mottled visor of his mask and the dust-filled space beyond it, Raikes watched the diseased encrustation of the stone clear, blur, clear again, the skin emerging white, millimetre by millimetre. The instrument seemed to attack the contaminated surface with an appetite of its own, stroking off the dross eagerly.

He worked with concentration. No single diseased grain would be allowed to survive. However uncontrollably murky his thoughts, this work of his hands would emerge pure; his hands alone would achieve it; restored she would be his creation, and his only. The faint hiss of impact, the hum of the compressed nitrogen feeding the cutter, signals of his own control and power. There was no sound in the enclosure, in the universe, but this, no sight but the slowly spreading whiteness – an absorption surely similar, he drifted into thinking, to that of the obscure artist who had made her, this shadowy Piedmontese. Yes, surely similar – it was a consolation to think so, to think that he had not given up all share in the creative process when he had lost faith in his talents as a sculptor, settled for the safe hierarchy of the museum with its salary structure and pension scheme. Loss of nerve, acceptance of reality, he would never know now. He had not wanted to be second best.

There were differences of course, apart from the obvious one. It was difficult for modern man to feel at the heart of things, unless insane; but the man who had made this statue had seen himself, not as a random particle of matter, but as second only to the angels, in a world that was the centre of the universe, in a city that was the richest and strongest maritime power that world had ever seen. Marvellous to have that sense of centrality. The price of course was to be constantly in God’s eye. Signor Biagi’s words came back to him: la parte esposta, the exposed position. Strangely long ago that seemed now …

He was roused from these thoughts by shouts from below. He rose, moved rather stiffly to the edge of his small enclosure and peered down. He was wearing his mask still and the plastic visor was dusty, moreover tended to distort vision slightly at distances greater than a yard or two. He made out a small group of figures standing below him, a little way out into the square, several workmen in overalls, a dark-suited man, a woman in a light-coloured coat.

Even before removing the mask he had a certain breathless sense of who the woman might be. When he snatched it off it was as if his eyes were inundated with light. This flooding of the retinas, and the immediate recognition that the woman was indeed Chiara Litsov, combined somehow to impede his vision once again. He closed his eyes in a long blink, opened them, saw that the man in the suit was Biagi, that Chiara was smiling.

‘Can I come up and see what you’re doing?’ She had put her hands to the sides of her face, the better to wing these words to him.

Biagi, no doubt thinking that such a matter had to be discussed between men, acted as mediator. ‘Chiede se può salire,’ he shouted. ‘She asks if she may come up.’

Raikes was aware of hush below, a suspension of activity among the workmen. All sounds seemed to have stopped. Suddenly he felt a wave of pride; she was asking for him.

‘Vuole guardare il lavoro,’ Biagi shouted, continuing in his role of male herald of female desires.

‘Come up if you like,’ Raikes called. ‘It’s rather dirty up here. Be careful on the ladder. Va bene, può salire,’ he added to Biagi, feeling obliged to carry on the official, male side of the dialogue.

He watched the contractor escort her towards the foot of the ladder. Then they were both lost to sight, cut off by the edge of the platform on which he was standing. Signor Biagi did not reappear: he would be intent on the Signora’s progress up the ladder; so would all the workmen who happened to be outside the church at the moment. Raikes tried to remember, or perhaps he had not noticed, what she had been wearing under the coat. He found himself hoping, in the moments of waiting that now followed, that it had not been a skirt. Then her head appeared above the edge of the planks and he went forward to help her.

She needed little help, however, but was up on to the platform quickly and lightly, with a grasp of his outstretched hand that lasted a moment only. ‘So this is where you do your restoring,’ she said. ‘I was curious, after hearing you talk about it. I was in town and so I thought I would come and have a look.’

This came all in a breath and somehow prematurely, or so it seemed to Raikes, as if she were eager to account for this uninvited visit, or at least as if she were conscious, in the silence of his regard, of needing to make some defence. This gave him pleasure, he could not have said exactly why. If she was warning him not to presume, he was glad she thought him worth warning.

‘I see you’re wearing trousers,’ he said, for want of other notions of what to say, and because, in the terrific hush of her approach up the ladder, it had been on his mind.

‘Yes,’ she said, rather vaguely. Then, perhaps catching some note of satisfaction in his voice, she smiled and said, ‘They are best when it comes to climbing ladders.’

There was a pause while Raikes struggled to absorb this smile. Then he gestured towards the Madonna. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is my lady. She’s in a bit of a mess at present, I’m afraid. You may not be able to get a proper idea of her.’

It was true that the Madonna was unsightly, with the speckled dust lying over her, powdering her encrusted face, caught like dirty pollen in her robes.

‘This is the bit I’ve done so far,’ Raikes said, pointing. ‘It is slow work.’

She went nearer to inspect it. ‘There’s a huge difference,’ she said. ‘This is the pure stone again, isn’t it?’

‘As pure as it will ever be.’ Was she merely humouring him, showing polite interest? The suspicion conflicted with his proprietary enthusiasm. He said, ‘Something is always lost, you know.’

This had a pompous sound, even to him, but she did not look up. She had crouched and was running a slim hand down the line of the Madonna’s right flank. ‘He knew what a leg looks like, didn’t he? How white the stone is.’ Her hand had a warm pallor, almost vivid against the cleaned stone.

‘It looks whiter by comparison, or so I am hoping. It should be a very pale cream colour. In its pristine state, I mean. That is one of the things that is bothering me, whether this blasting process will take the warmth from the stone. It’s Istrian stone, you know.’

Somewhere in the midst of these words his feelings had quickened, changed course. Whether it was the sight of the woman’s living hand on the stone, or the angle of her head as she crouched there, the dark hair falling forward to reveal the pale skin of her nape above the coat collar, something childlike and wondering about her caressing of the ancient texture of the limestone – something of reverence too, as if she were paying her respects; somewhere among all this there was a factor not accidental, striking him with the sense of something foretold, fulfilled. She chose this moment to turn, throwing back her hair, and look at him; still not rising, however.

‘Istrian stone,’ he plunged, ‘as perhaps you know, is a very dense form of limestone. When I say dense … the capillaries are very close together, much closer than in marble, for example. Marble is more permeable …’

He fell helplessly silent. In the pause that followed their eyes met. She seemed at first to be waiting for him to say more. Then her expression changed. She stood up and after a moment said, ‘I’d be really interested to see the work actually in progress. Would you mind very much?’

This request changed the quality of his hesitation – as perhaps she had intended. To refuse her anything was scarcely conceivable. On the other hand, there was the shining hair, her lashes and eyes, the clear skin of her face, her narrow hands even; and then the coat, obviously of good quality. All this must be protected, down to the last pore, follicle and fibre.

‘It’s rather a messy operation,’ he said. ‘The dust, you know.’

‘I could wear something over my face.’

‘Perhaps we could find you something to put on. I keep a spare mask here. If you really want to, that is.’

‘I do, yes.’

The tone of this made further discussion superfluous. He left her there and began clambering down the ladder, his heart beating in his ears. In certain states of disturbance one becomes self-conscious, pausing where one would not pause, noting the trivial as if it were significant; Raikes found himself registering the paint-flaked rungs of the ladder and his own momentous feet, in their shabby tennis shoes, descending.

At ground level, however, consulting Signor Biagi, several of the workmen within earshot, dignity demanded a leisurely style, an attitude of good-humoured indulgence towards female caprice. He hoped this was what showed on his face.

‘They get these ideas,’ he said, smiling, trying to control his breathing. ‘Si mettono in testa queste idee …’

This sentiment was deeply familiar to Biagi, who shrugged and nodded humorously. ‘Che ci possiamo fare?’ he said. ‘What can we do?’

‘Strange creatures.’ A terrible impatience to be back up the ladder assailed Raikes. He shook his head, smiling indulgently. ‘Non si sa mai,’ he said. ‘You never know what they will get into their heads.’

One or two of the nearby workmen laughed and exclaimed approvingly at this. ‘Non si sa mai,’ one of them echoed. Raikes became aware that his stock had gone up since Chiara’s visit – here at ground level at least.

‘Che ci possiamo fare?’ he repeated, smiling and shrugging at the workmen, united with them in resignation and indomitable logic.

Biagi was so pleased with this that he went so far as to clap the Englishman on the shoulder. ‘Non si sa mai, eh?’ he said, chuckling. ‘Non si sa mai cosa gli salta in mente.’

Raikes obtained some overalls and a reasonably clean-looking cap. Clutching these, calmed by social success, he began to climb back up the ladder.

She was looking at the Madonna’s face when he returned, her own face held close. She was of a height with the statue and when she turned towards him the two faces were level, close together, flesh and stone, the one vivid with life, the other blurred and streaked with ancient lamentation. Once again a fugitive sense of recognition stirred in him. Then she moved away and the moment was lost.

He helped her off with the coat, not touching her, aware of not touching her. The overalls were too large, slipping off at the shoulders, needing to be rolled up at the ankles. She pushed up her hair, bunching it under the cap with both hands, lowering her face at the same time, gestures hasty and careless, though piercing to Raikes. He gave her the spare mask and showed her how to put it on.

In the shapeless overalls, with the cap covering her hair and the mask over her face, she was unrecognizable, a creature metamorphosed. He stared at her for a moment, then put on his own mask and cap. First shaking out the cable to keep it clear of the cutter, he crouched before the Madonna, Chiara crouching beside him – they were shoulder to shoulder, almost touching, like devotees at an altar. The faint drone of the machine filled the enclosure, followed a moment later by the hissing assault on the stone.

Raikes resumed at a point slightly higher than where he had left off, so that she would be able to see the contrast. Here, where the robe was gathered up to the high girdle, the folds were intricate. He advanced the nozzle close to the surface, withdrew it as the encrustation thinned. Delicately, savagely, the glass crystals thrashed at the stone. Dust rose around them, glinting briefly in the light.

When he stopped a narrow strip of perhaps three inches had been reclaimed. He turned his head to look at her. Through dust-thickened air and misted planes of plastic, her face seemed suspended, indistinct, as if seen through some slightly opaque medium. Raikes felt that sea-shell resonance in his ears, he experienced a sort of swooning tremor and instinctively clutched for balance at the Madonna’s knee. This passed at once. For a few seconds longer they crouched there, silent and motionless at the base of the statue. Then Chiara stood up, removed the cap and mask, shook out her hair. ‘That was really very interesting,’ she said. ‘Thank you for letting me watch.’

Raikes got up slowly. ‘It’s a long job, as you see,’ he said. Retrieving her coat from its polythene wrapper, helping her on with it, he felt, though more faintly, the usual belated fear, as of danger recognized only after escape. ‘Still, we’re getting on,’ he said.

She turned to face him. ‘You must be very patient,’ she said. She had smiled as she spoke, but now the smile faded and she looked rather attentively at him, though she said nothing more.

‘Yes … Well, I don’t know if it is patience. A kind of crab-like tenacity.’ In a few moments, he thought, if I don’t do something to prevent it, she will be climbing back down the ladder. I will go down too, of course. At the foot of the ladder she will thank me again, then she will walk away, back to home and husband. Better do nothing, let her go … ‘Do you fancy a cup of coffee or a drink or something?’ he said.

‘What a good idea. A drink would be nice. As a matter of fact, I’ve got one or two things to tell you. Nothing very much, I’m afraid. I’ve had a reply from my aunt – the one in Rome that I told you about. The guardian of the family secrets.’

It was exactly what Lattimer had replied, and in exactly the same tone, when he had asked for whisky. What a good idea. ‘It was very good of you to bother,’ he said.

‘Well, we can talk about it over the drink.’