‘Each of those flags must be half as big as a tennis court.’
Sitting outside Quadri’s – for Florian’s was in the shade – Gloria made this discovery with the satisfaction of a traveller in antique lands who comes momentarily in contact with some familiar thing. Tennis had perhaps been in her head; she wouldn’t at all have minded three brisk sets; she had been rather short of exercise – except of the tramping round sort – since coming to this astonishing city. You could swim on the Lido, and according to the guide book it was the most fashionable seaside resort in Italy. But when she reflected that it was only a few miles away from all those canals she had her doubts about it. The idea that the Adriatic and indeed the whole Mediterranean had become one big cesspool was obviously modish rot, and into any sea that looked right she was willing enough to plunge without demanding preliminary bacteriological analysis. But the Lido she hadn’t taken to at all.
She had taken to this enormous square, just as she was now taking to these enormous flags. Two were national flags, brightly banal except for their breathtaking size. But on the other two St Mark’s winged lion (a ubiquitous creature, and frequently for some reason provided with a football) was blazoned in gold upon a maroon ground. But ‘maroon’ was ridiculous; here was a colour indescribably splendid which had been familiar to her, she nostalgically thought, on certain expanses of ancient stuff at Nudd. And this didn’t end the impressiveness of these two civic flags; each of them ended in six long points or tails which flared like comets against the background of the extraordinary church – not in the least like a church – beyond.
‘Wunderschon!’ Gloria said – still about the flags.
‘Wunderbar!’ Miss Christine Anderson echoed. Miss Anderson was Gloria’s travelling companion.
‘Ausgezeichnet!’ Gloria brilliantly offered. On Garda there had been numerous Germans – hundreds of them, in fact – and their enthusiasms had amused the English ladies very much. Here in the Piazza San Marco (described by a more sophisticated traveller as the drawing-room of Europe) they were aware of, but not much disturbed by, their own unfurnished cultural condition.
‘You’d think,’ Miss Anderson said on a practical note, ‘that when they take them down for the night they could use them as dust-sheets to cover the whole cathedral. For I suppose it is a cathedral. Basilica seems to be the local word. That’s what’s in the book.’
‘What about another ice?’ Gloria asked, on a note more practical still.
‘They cost the earth in this square.’
‘Oh, well!’ And Gloria waved at a waiter. It was the wrong waiter, but he hurried obligingly over to them, all the same. During their wanderings it had come to be admitted that Gloria had no need to travel on twopence, and she and Kirstie were sufficiently good friends not to have to bother about small reckonings. Gloria’s social conscience, which was robust but not fanatical, would even have stretched to decent hotels. But that would have required a different proposal at the start, and turned Kirstie into a kind of semi-paid companion, which would be absurd. So, on the whole, they were doing Italy on the cheap. Kirstie was a Theatre Sister; she slaved like a probationer and carried large responsibilities; they paid her,
Gloria supposed, about what they paid a dustman.
‘The campanile looks quite new,’ Kirstie said. She remembered to speak disapprovingly, although anybody who works in an East End hospital should have nothing but praise for a modern fabric.
‘It is new.’ This odd fact had caught Gloria’s eye in her Blue Guide. ‘The old one fell down, and this one was opened on 25 April 1912.’ A respect for dates was something she had caught from her mother.
‘Opened?’
‘Yes – you go up in a lift. But if you want to pay less there’s an easy sloping walk.’
‘An easy sloping walk?’ Kirstie echoed unbelievingly. She turned her gaze from the towering brick monster to cast an anticipatory glance on the second ice. It had arrived, complete with a glass of water and a hospital-looking spoon, with commendable speed.
‘That’s what it says. Do you think they have a band playing here all the year round? It’s almost winter now.’
‘It doesn’t feel like winter.’
‘An old man in the pensione told me it can turn wintry at any time. There are storms, and all this goes under water. It can even freeze.’
‘Think of those flags frozen hard. Like the tin ones they leave on the moon.’
The flags were almost like that now. A brisk breeze, cunningly insinuating itself into the drawing-room of Europe by way of the Mercerie, was blowing them stiffly out in the direction of the Piazzetta. It was four o’clock. The mori on the Torre dell’Orologio, as if abruptly awakening to the fact, phrenetically banged out the hour on their bell. A thousand well-trained pigeons rose obediently in air. The lady peddling granturco in the middle of the Piazza (she was without commercial rivals now that the high holiday-season was over), encouraged by this activity on the part of the beneficiaries of her zeal, waved her wares and uttered shrill cries in competition with the band. The band, playing Gounod, played Gounod louder. On the shady side of the vast space ranks of cleared tables and empty chairs suggested a deserted theatre, but without much affecting the general animation of the scene. It would be another month before the tourists finally departed and the Venetians themselves became distinguishable again.
One Venetian, however, in addition to the waiters and the granturco lady, was identifiable now. He wore, indeed, in addition to a pair of ragged shorts, a T-shirt upon which the word ‘Oxford’ was imprinted in large letters beneath a representation of three crowns and an open book. But this appeared to be a tribute to, rather than a claim to residence within, a celebrated place of learning, since its owner was a boy of eleven or twelve. He was selling newspapers. And as that is an occupation commonly reserved in Italy for male citizens of mature years he was rather pleased with the job.
Kirstie bought a paper. She bought an Italian one, although this was difficult to achieve and even seemed a little to offend the young Oxonian. At school she had done Spanish, since at that time she had appeared doomed to a commercial career, and she could work her way through Italian sentences as a result. This useful accomplishment impressed Gloria a good deal. But for the moment Kirstie deferred intellectual exercise, to occupy herself alternately with her ice and the astonishing edifice beyond the flags. The light was changing – in Venice it never does anything else – and the Basilica was changing with it; it seemed to claim less and less to be a building, and to admit itself more and more an exhalation merely. The spectacle has never been described. ‘Clear as amber and delicate as ivory,’ Ruskin tried, and went on to evoke ‘marble foam’, ‘sculptured spray’, and similar bold tropes. Competent authorities aver his to be the best shot, but it still won’t quite do. For one thing, amid all this ethereal delicacy a certain high-handed mastering of architectural and decorative incongruities is an element in the effect, and analysis of this is difficult to achieve. Kirstie arrived upon the fringes of it with her next remark.
‘Isn’t it very odd,’ she asked, ‘to stick horses on a church?’
‘It must be something to do with their religion.’
‘I don’t see why – not even for Catholics. Jesus travelled by donkey as a baby, and on an ass, which I suppose is the same thing, later on.’ Kirstie had been well brought up. ‘But I don’t remember that he ever had anything to do with horses.’
‘They’re good horses.’ Gloria shifted, as it were, the angle of appraisal. ‘And they must be nearly twenty hands.’
The four superb creatures on the loggia were certainly that, for proportions and perspectives are tricky before such a scene. And even from this distance their noble bronze glinted with residual gold. Mounted on them – Gloria suddenly thought – there ought to be four splendid young men.
‘Read about them,’ Kirstie said. She was a conscientious girl.
‘Greek work of the time of Alexander.’ Gloria had obediently rummaged in her guide. ‘Possibly from the Rhodian Chariot of the Sun at Delphi.’ Gloria looked up. ‘What does yours say?’ she demanded. Scepticism had been growing in her over matters of this sort.
‘Oh, very well.’ Kirstie too had a book: one devoted entirely to this unmanageable city. She consulted the index and turned to the appropriate page. ‘Made in Imperial Rome,’ she presently announced, ‘and later sent to Constantinople. And—do you know?—it says they’re loot. Pretty cool, putting loot on a church. They ought to be in a museum, if you ask me.’
‘Or sent back to Constantinople.’ Gloria fell silent. Perhaps the fontana minore, she was thinking, ought to be sent back to Viterbo.
Quite soon – if unbelievably – it was going to turn chilly. The fact would not be acknowledged in their pensione. And you have to go to rather a grand hotel in Italy before finding anywhere much in which to sit comfortably around. Undeniably, an awkwardly long evening stretched before them.
‘Do you think there’s a cinema?’ Gloria asked.
‘Of course there must be cinemas. It stands to reason.’
‘I haven’t seen any. But look in your paper. That ought to tell.’
Not without alacrity, Kirstie embarked on this alternative line of research. Sure enough, Venice – throned on her hundred isles – did have cinemas. There were at least half a dozen of them.
‘L’Assassino di Rillington Place: Numero Died,’ Kirstie read. ‘How about that?’
‘I don’t think so.’ They hadn’t come nine hundred miles, Gloria felt, to plunge into London affairs not wholly remote from the professional experience of either. ‘Isn’t there something about Italians?’
‘I Licenziosi Desideri,’ Kirstie read slowly and laboriously, ‘Di una Ragazza Moderna con il Complesso della Verginita. I’ve no doubt that’s about Italians. And pretty permissive, if your taste lies that way.’
‘It doesn’t. Try again.’
‘II Prigionero di Zenda.’
‘That’s it! We’ve got the book at home.’
‘In Italian?’ Kirstie, having heard about the mysteries of Nudd, wasn’t surprised.
‘Of course not. It’s an English book. The Prisoner of Zenda, by a man called Anthony Hope. When I read it as a kid, I thought it absolutely fab.’
‘We’ll go to that.’ Kirstie put down her paper, and was then struck by a sudden thought. ‘But I say! Do you think that in Italy girls go to cinemas and places of that sort without an escort?’
‘What utter rot!’ Gloria was astonished by this positively medieval question. ‘You don’t imagine we can’t look after ourselves? And I didn’t notice you much minding when those sailors whistled at us down there on the Riva.’
‘They were rather nice sailors.’
‘Well, perhaps the young males at the cinema will be rather nice too. And, even if the worst comes to the worst, it won’t do you much harm to have your bottom pinched. It can happen in London on the Underground.’ Gloria offered these flippant remarks because she was really rather startled. Kirstie Anderson was several years older than she was and to be presumed rich in worldly wisdom.
‘It’s just a thought,’ Kirstie said. ‘Perhaps one of those ancient American women in the pensione—’
‘Excuse me,’ a voice said from the next table. ‘It’s frightful cheek to butt in. But would it be too absolutely shocking and improper if I asked whether I might come along?’
They stared at the young Englishman who had made this incredible speech. He had been listening to their conversation – and as at least a scrap of it had been what is conventionally called indelicate he hadn’t chosen too tactful a moment for announcing the fact. On the other hand, his boldness had something attractive about it. It wasn’t boldness in the sense in which the word can mean assurance or impudence. He was looking at once lively and alarmed. It was evident that they had only to utter a word – or not utter a word – and he would acknowledge his outrageousness and bolt.
‘It’s very kind of you to have taken an interest in us,’ Kirstie said drily.
‘I’m terribly sorry!’ Thus mildly rebuked, the young man blushed. This was definitely engaging. Nobody can turn on a blush – as they can turn on, say, a stammer or an appropriate sort of laugh. A blush – at least if it is only a faint blush or flush – is a perfectly manly thing, and seems to witness to ingenuousness of intention. ‘Forget it,’ the young man said. ‘Or—dash it!—no. Consider it, give it a chance, for just a moment. It’s not absolutely awful. I’m a perfectly respectable character. I’m in the perfectly respectable pensione next to yours. I noticed you going out this morning.’
If Gloria felt this was a little too much fuss she hardly registered it. She was thinking that very faintly in her head the young man rang a bell. Had she noticed him lying in bed as she trundled her tea-trolley through a ward? It seemed improbable. He did have ‘London’ somehow written all over him, but he didn’t have written all over him what was still sometimes called ‘hospital class’. She certainly hadn’t seen him on a rugger field; he wasn’t the type that plays for Blackheath or has ever collected an important Cap or a Blue. Perhaps she’d glimpsed him on television, talking about polyphonic music or the future of the pound sterling. It could only have been a glimpse, since she always turned that sort of programme off. In any case, she wasn’t going to make a talking point of the thing now.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘And we’ll meet outside the cinema just before the film starts.’ However right Kirstie was about escorts, she was herself determined absolutely to decline the need for one while walking through Venice of an early evening.
‘That will be most—’
‘Oh, look! Somebody’s climbed on one of the horses.’
This was Kirstie’s interruption, perhaps made merely from an impulse to create a diversion: she had to take in the new situation. But there could be no doubt about the horse. The great bronze creature now had a rider. High above the Piazza though he was, he could be distinguished as a young man of the wandering, long-haired sort – but even with a leg-up from a friend he must own considerable athletic skill to have made his present perch. He didn’t, however, at all suggest one of the four splendid youths Gloria had lately imagined, since he was so out of scale with his mount that he looked like a more than usually shrunken jockey, or even like one of those unfortunate monkeys clinging on for dear life during an equestrian turn in a circus. The neighbouring horse had the appearance of turning its head to give him a glance of disdain. Gloria was just going to laugh at this when her new acquaintance burst into surprising speech.
‘Good God! It’s an utter outrage. They’ll allow anything, absolutely anything. What they’re not actively corroding with fumes and acids from their beastly factories they’re simply allowing to sink and slide into the lagoon. Those horses are as precious as anything surviving from the ancient world. And the next thing we’ll see is yahoos like that carving their names on their flanks.’
Gloria – apart from considering this last an improbable prognostication – was astonished by the vehemence of the prospective cinema patron’s tone. And a moment later she had caught in it something more: the note of high indignation against the general Philistine cast of things in the modern world that she associated with certain of her mother’s visitors to Nudd. Persons professionally concerned with the arts, they had commonly been. And suddenly a clear memory came to her.
‘Do you know?’ she said. ‘I think we’ve just glimpsed each other once before.’
‘Have we?’ For a brief moment the young man was taken aback. ‘It’s quite possible, Miss Montacute. For I think you are Miss Montacute, aren’t you? I’ve been to your house, as a matter of fact.’ His manner had become grave and candid. ‘I haven’t mentioned it, because it was on the day your mother died. It seemed an awkward thing to speak of, straight away.’
‘You drove down with another man.’
‘Yes, indeed: Lambert Domberg, the head of my firm. My name’s Octavius Chevalley. What an odd encounter this is.’
‘It’s all of that,’ Kirstie Anderson said crisply.