7

CLUTCHING THE CARRIER bag Raikes walked for some time without much noticing which way he was going. His mind, always very tenacious, was occupied with a simple logical series repeated over and over again. Could Litsov simply have forgotten or omitted to wear the other cufflink? This was unlikely; he had been dressed with conspicuous care, prepared for the world – Chiara had exclaimed at sight of his debonair tie-pin; besides, it would have been noticeable, one of his shirt sleeves would have been loose, or had a tendency to flap, or been in some way noticeably different from the other. Anyway, it was not the sort of thing you would forget to do – you might put on odd socks or forget to do up your fly, but you would know you hadn’t a cufflink in, you would feel the difference. It had to be supposed that when he and Chiara left the house both cufflinks were still in place.

Very probably at any rate, he thought. He began to feel the need for a drink. Somewhere behind this dogged reasoning he sensed something terrible beginning to loom, but he couldn’t stop. He saw Litsov’s blank stare again, that meekly open mouth. What could be imagined as happening to him in the water that could have left his handkerchief and tie in place and at the same time pulled one of his cufflinks through four separate apertures in four separate thicknesses of sodden cotton?

He was crossing the Campo San Marino now in the direction of the church of the Miracoli. At the north side of the canal he hesitated for a while, then turned left. After a few steps it came to him that he should be going in the opposite direction, towards the Fondamenta Nuova, to catch the Burano boat for his visit to Chiara. But there was something he should do first. What was it? Of course, he must put Litsov’s things somewhere … Could the cufflink have been lost during recovery of the body or by the police later? No, it was missing when I found him, sleeve of both jacket and shirt had ridden up, baring part of the left forearm. Of course at the time I did not associate this with …

At the Miracoli bridge he paused irresolutely, his desire for a drink increasing. Could someone have taken the cufflink? At this moment he heard his name called and turning saw Slingsby bearing down on him in what looked like the same billowing fawn suit, as if he had been in limbo since their last meeting, waiting to materialize again.

‘Well, hullo there,’ Slingsby said. ‘Mr Raikes, isn’t it? How goes it? How is the stone lady?’

Raikes felt his hand enfolded in a larger, softer one. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’m not far off the end now. There’s only her face.’

‘That’s just great,’ Slingsby said. The pink expanse of his face eddied with suggestions of pleasure and approbation though the small blue eyes were as anxious as ever. A compound odour of gin and peppermint creams came from him.

‘What brings you this way?’ Raikes said.

‘I’ve been looking at the marble panels in the Miracoli church. That is something I do from time to time. It is a wonderful thing, Mr Raikes, and a deeply reassuring thing, to discover a beauty and harmony which depends on no depiction of the human form or other humanized motifs.’

Slingsby paused, making delicate fidgety motions just below his chin. ‘I do not like the human image,’ he said. ‘Not really. Not deep down. If you ever want a trip on a downward slope go from these beautiful marble panels to the sculptures at the Giovanni and Paolo church, severe, yes, restrained, yes, but our ugly passion for self-replication is evident already; from there to the grotesqueries of the Ospedaletto; finish up with that hideous, degenerate face on the campanile of Santa Maria Formosa – the gratuitous ugliness of which inspired your John Ruskin’s wrath and disgust.’

‘Not mine,’ Raikes said. ‘I don’t like Ruskin much. Besides, he was wrong. That face on the campanile is now thought to be a realistic portrait of a person actually suffering from a painful and degenerative disease.’ Of course, he thought, if someone did take the cufflink, then that person must have witnessed his death or found him dead and since he did not try to save him or get help or do anything at all … But why take a cufflink?

There was only one conceivable reason.

‘I hope you don’t think that disproves Ruskin’s point or mine,’ Slingsby said. ‘Facts like that have got nothing to do with truth. Somebody chose to carve that face, for a joke I guess – Venice is full of jokes. Would you care for a drink?’

‘I’d like one very much,’ Raikes said.

They found a table in the Café-Bar of the Miracoli on the corner of the square. Slingsby asked if they had gin and relaxed visibly when told that they did. ‘I like gin,’ he said, ‘it’s a clean drink.’ Raikes asked for cognac and swallowed half of it at once.

‘There’s another reason why I like those panels,’ Slingsby said. ‘They are reasonably secure from deterioration, at least over the foreseeable future. You can’t say that for the external stonework.’

Raikes nodded, saying nothing. It could be seen from the greater fixity of his regard that Slingsby was returning to his obsessions, now that the flurry of the encounter had died down. It was necessary only to keep up an appearance of attention. She will be waiting for me, he thought. Moving about the house, alone in it, alone on the island, lagoon water glimmering all round her, the water where her husband died. She had stayed on there in the house. He had thought this was courage … We might have a fire later, and the oil lamps on, something to drink, and we would talk, sit close together in the firelight. When I hear her voice and look into her face everything will be all right again, these hideously breeding maggots of doubt will shrivel and die … But not in that room where his bronzes are, those polished ambivalent fragments. Five thousand pounds. Litsov is my creation, my husband almost never leaves the island. Never again anywhere now …

‘This is granite we’re talking about,’ Slingsby was saying. ‘A granite obelisk. At one stage of its career this obelisk lay prostrate on the delta silts of the Nile, at Heliopolis, for five hundred years. Five hundred years, Mr Raikes, lost and forgotten, soaking up soluble salts by capillary migration and at a tremendous rate – this is flood-plain silt we’re talking about. Yet did the salts in those pores hydrate? No sir, they didn’t. And why? You know and I know the answer to that.’ Slingsby advanced his face a little, pausing for effect. ‘Atmosphere too dry,’ he said, carefully stretching his moist little mouth round the words. ‘All the same if it was five thousand years. Now you put that obelisk up here, or in New York’s Central Park or on the London Embankment and in two years the surface would be dripping off it. Two years.’

‘I know,’ Raikes said. ‘It’s amazing.’

‘See it as a courtship ritual,’ Slingsby said. ‘That is the way I have taken to thinking of it. Borrow a leaf from the naturalist’s book. Strictly heterosexual of course. The water drops we should see as female, the hungry and highly motivated SO₂ as male. The randy sulphur dioxide swirls about just longing to get into the pants of the H₂O, have its way, swarm down on to the stone in aqueous solution, a nuptial flight that ends in a bath of sulphuric acid.’

Slingsby paused, staring solemnly at Raikes, his hands busy with their curious plucking motions in the air before his chest. ‘For sexual intercourse read hydrolization,’ he said.

‘Are you having another?’ Raikes said. ‘I’m going to.’

‘Yes. Double gin please. Think of it cosmically. Think of the dangers to stone in the atmosphere, even without the interference of man. Think of the dissolved gases and ions concentrated in the dust, impalpable, invisible to the naked eye, the influence of oceans and desert flats on the sulphate and chlorate content, the continuous mixing of the air masses by winds and vertical updraughts …’

It was clear by now that Slingsby was talking himself into a state of nervous agitation. Threads of saliva stretched at the corners of his mouth. His little blue eyes stared affrightedly. ‘I can hardly stand to think about it,’ he said.

Raikes stirred and spoke with an effort. ‘I thought it was only in literature that the Americans had an Apocalyptic School,’ he said, attempting a smile. ‘There is something I was wondering about, I’m afraid it is changing the subject … Do you by any chance know how many casts a sculptor is allowed to make of a particular work?’

Slingsby blinked and moved his bulky shoulders, as if emerging from some dream. ‘Casts?’ he said. ‘We are talking about metal sculptures then?’

‘Yes.’

‘As many as he wants, I guess. So long as he doesn’t call them originals. He wouldn’t want to make copies, depreciates the currency. Normally speaking he would scrap the moulds after the first casting.’

‘Yes, quite. No, I meant originals.’

‘I’m not sure,’ Slingsby said. ‘I think I read somewhere that the US Bureau of Customs currently recognizes the first four as originals, no, maybe it is six. I don’t know about the British.’

‘Probably much the same with us.’ Raikes finished his drink and stood up. ‘I’ll have to rush off, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Various things to see to – rather pressing.’

He was in such haste to get away before Slingsby offered to accompany him that he almost forgot the carrier bag.