Gloria was alone, and in front of her on the table stood an espresso. To Octavius’s eye the minute cup, not quite filled with the blackest of black coffee, bore an austere and even forbidding appearance. He realised that he was going to be very easily unnerved.
‘Hullo,’ Gloria said, and dropped a lump of sugar into the cup. She could only just have arrived.
‘Hullo.’ Octavius tried to take heart from Gloria’s not going in for a formal ‘good morning’. But probably she never did. ‘Where’s Kirstie?’ he asked. As he didn’t much care where Kirstie was, and had no intention of dishonestly continuing to simulate interest in her, he’d perhaps put this question rather too soon. And he’d even asked it with anxiety – although the anxiety was only a kind of spill-over from an adjacent area of his mind.
‘You sound quite breathless, Octavius. Have you been running, or something? Do sit down.’
‘I thought you might be here.’ Octavius had liked being called Octavius in this normal way. ‘But I was back on Carpaccio, and I’d rather forgotten the time.’
Gloria nodded – briefly, but with seeming approval. What she was approving of, perhaps, was the general proposition that men should put their work first. Gloria was the superior sort of girl, he told himself, who takes a serious view of life.
‘This way of doing coffee,’ Gloria said, ‘you’d think was about right for a cage of canaries. But even a small swig of it is bracing. You’d better order one.’
Octavius ordered one, thereby admitting that he needed to be braced.
‘Kirstie has broken it up,’ Gloria said casually.
‘Broken it up!’ The alarm in Octavius’s voice disconcerted him as he detected it. But it seemed faintly to amuse Gloria.
‘Oh, just for the day,’ she said. ‘She has gone on a steamer to a place called Chioggia. The book says it’s the principal fishing port of Italy, and Kirstie said it would do her good to see a spot of honest labour going forward.’
‘She’ll do that, all right.’ Here was the theme of work again. Octavius was intelligent enough to be aware that both these young women worked hard themselves, and liked it. And if that’s your disposition, a holiday tends to fold up on you after three or four weeks at most. They’d probably both had about enough of Italy. ‘There’s a kind of second-rate Lido effect nearby, but at Chioggia itself they do land plenty of fish.’
‘Is there anything by Carpaccio at Chioggia?’
‘Oh, yes!’ By this enquiry, which seemed not mischievously intended, Octavius was quite touched. ‘There’s a St Paul in the church of San Domenico. And Kirstie will have a nice trip there.’ His spirits were rising. ‘The boat touches at two islands entirely populated by lunatics. And there’s a third, which your guide book describes as “verdant”, reserved for the extremely aged. You see the bright eyes of the ancient creatures peering out at you through the undergrowth as you sail past.’ Octavius paused, and suddenly decided that this all-is-forgotten note of levity was quite wrong. ‘Gloria!’ he said urgently, ‘I want to—’
‘And what are you going to do? Today, I mean.’ Gloria’s tone didn’t acknowledge the slightest consciousness of having interrupted. ‘For it’s rather a gorgeous day.’
‘I’d like you to come to Torcello with me.’ To Octavius’s surprised sense, this had uttered itself like an inspiration. ‘It’s just the day for that.’
‘What’s Torcello?’
‘It’s another island.’
‘With lunatics?’
‘Of course not. It’s in the other direction.’
‘Not where they make you buy lace or glass?’ Gloria plainly felt she had bought enough of these commodities.
‘No, no – that’s Murano and Burano. You stop at them, but there’s no need to get off. Not if you’re on the ordinary vaporetto, and not on one of those shocking tourist affairs. And Torcello itself is really very nice.’ Octavius’s vein of inspiration continued. ‘There’s almost nothing there at all.’
‘Nothing?’ Gloria was visibly attracted.
‘Well, there’s a more or less abandoned cathedral, which is very splendid; and a more or less abandoned little church, which is very beautiful; and there’s a very good restaurant, which won’t be all that crowded at this time of year. And, Gloria, I’d be awfully pleased if you’d come to Torcello with me, and lunch with me there.’
These were, or seemed to be, accents which it is not for a young woman to mistake. What chiefly struck Gloria – what touched her to an extent she recognised and, somehow, accepted without surprise – was the fact that she was being invited out to lunch. Octavius was poor, and it was useless to pretend she wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t this time talking about going Dutch, all the same. It made the situation serious, but she didn’t think she was afraid of that.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said, and waved to the waiter. She would at least pay for her own espresso. ‘When do we go?’
‘Oh, we can set off at once.’ Octavius looked happy, but also rather alarmed; he was feeling, she supposed, that some die had been cast. ‘We just walk over to the Fondamente Nuove, and with luck we shan’t have to wait ten minutes.’
Gloria felt that there would now be a longer wait than that before Octavius came out with what he had to say. He had, she guessed, some particular setting in his head – or perhaps a favourite building or picture or statue from the presence of which he was proposing to draw support in a crisis. That would be extremely like Octavius, she told herself with as much confidence as if she had watched his development from childhood. And how enormously different he was from Harry – and, in a way, how very much more mysterious! She found it perplexing that anybody quite young should go in passionately for art. Of course, she knew that this was only because her mother’s art-loving associates had without exception been elderly and very plainly money-loving as well. All the great painters had themselves been young once: Octavius had explained that Raphael (whom she remembered her mother disapproving of) had done some of his best stuff when of positively tender years. She must revise her ideas. She made a start now by telling herself that Octavius would certainly be the world’s top authority on Carpaccio before he was thirty. And that this was quite something to be.
These thoughts (which point the sombre fact that loyalty and susceptibility constitute a hazardous combination in a young woman) took Gloria across Venice now. She was glad that Octavius wasn’t rushing anything, because she did very sensibly feel that she had real thinking to do. There were people to whom it would be of no account whatever that Octavius was your only coming oracle on Carpaccio, and there were people to whom it would similarly be of no account whatever that Harry might become your only possible choice as a full back for England. That was one way to put her problem to herself – but of course it could be expressed in other terms. You played for England on the strength of a certain radical masculinity which wasn’t a bit relevant when deciding whether a Sacred Conversation, or a Madonna with Donors, or a Saint Somebody in his Study, was by this artist or that.
They had paused in what she knew was called a campo, and before an equestrian monument. For a moment she wondered whether this was going to be Octavius’s supporting presence. It was plainly a tremendous thing. And if you wanted radical masculinity, the man on the horse was it.
‘Who is he?’ Gloria asked.
‘Who is he?’ As he repeated her question, Octavius stared at her much as if, standing on Westminster Bridge, she had uttered some such words as, ‘Please, what river is that?’ But at once he recovered himself. ‘It’s Bartolommeo Colleoni,’ he said, ‘and it’s by Verrocchio. Only he didn’t live to finish it.’
‘What was he?’
‘Verrocchio?’
‘No. Whoever you called him. The man on the horse.’
‘I’d say he was pretty well nobody at all. A run-of-the-mill ruffian, or small-time bandit. But the statue just happens to be the greatest thing of its kind in the world. Which is odd, I suppose. But then art can be like that. Verrocchio was told to do Colleoni. But he did an idea instead.’
‘Yes, I see.’ And Gloria did see. ‘I was thinking,’ she said suddenly, ‘there ought to be riders on those horses on the church. But naked, and not with terrific armour and helmets and all that. Like the ones in the British Museum.’
‘Splendid notion.’ If it came into Octavius’s head that this reference to the Elgin Marbles perhaps represented Gloria’s first-ever incursion into the field of comparative criticism, he didn’t betray the fact. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going to look at things much less arrogant.’
The vaporetto was crowded with country-people. At least they looked like that, although Gloria supposed the islands they were going out to counted as no more than suburbs of this watery city. They pushed past you vigorously, but with polite outcries of ‘Permesso!’ and ‘Scusi!’ such as you wouldn’t get on a London tube. Some were going to the cemetery, and at the cemetery a funeral party was arriving as well. So here was a gondola that really was a Ship of Death: an outsize affair exuberantly adorned but pervasively inky, as if Styx or Acheron, or similar nasty rivers one had been taught about at school, had coated it in their own hue. Over the top of fortresslike walls an army of cypresses, answeringly black, peered curiously at the new arrival. The cemetery island must be so crammed with corpses that it was surprising there was any room for trees. Gloria asked whether it was inhabited, and Octavius said there was a large population of cats.
Once past Murano, they were out on the lagoon. It had a loneliness that had nothing to do with distance. You could count the planes at the airport on the mainland; and here and there, all the time, you came on little islands with brick buildings crammed on top of them. The buildings didn’t look at all old, but they did look derelict; some of them were blind and blank structures which Octavius – although without giving much impression of authority – declared to have been powder-magazines. The fact of so much being deserted made for melancholy, and so did the unnatural stillness of the water. Torcello, when their wandering course eventually got them there, at first seemed melancholy too, but Gloria took to it at once. The canal and lagoon smells (which in fact she had by now rather taken to as well) were mingled as soon as you landed with something faintly aromatic, which might have come from herb gardens abandoned long ago. Commerce was represented by only one old man, who had a forlorn little stall on the quay. As they were the only voyagers to disembark, he naturally looked at them with expectation, and Octavius pleased Gloria by stopping, holding one of his Italian conversations, and buying a small and gaily enamelled bangle at the substantially reduced price which the right sort of Italian conversation secures. The old man wrapped it up carefully in tissue paper – rather as if (Gloria thought, recalling a stray reminiscence by the well-travelled Guise) he had been a goldsmith on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, with some really high-class jewellery at his command.
‘It’s for you,’ Octavius said, and handed her the minute parcel with a subdued flourish which one of Carpaccio’s well-bred young Venetian gallants might have learnt from. That the gift had cost less than a pint of beer or a packet of cigarettes pleased Gloria still further, and she would have unwrapped the bangle and slipped it on at once if she had been quite confident it would clasp over her wrist. ‘Just as many ghosts here as on San Michele,’ Octavius said.
‘San Michele – the place there’s a story about?’ Gloria, although not a literary character, had recalled Axel Munthe’s celebrated book.
‘Well, no, that’s another one – near Naples.’ Octavius was amused, and Gloria found she quite liked amusing Octavius. ‘The cemetery island is called San Michele. But, you see, this one – and it’s really quite tiny – had about 20,000 inhabitants at one time. Their ghosts are bound to be around. You’re going to adore Torcello.’ Octavius produced one of his attractive, because rare, displays of confidence. ‘It has a kind of enchanted effect. Sleeping Beauty stuff.’
This was true. They walked along the margin of a narrow canal to a tiny basin, and in front of them there distinguishably appeared the vestiges of a piazza which must have been, at some remote time, the centre of a flourishing town.
‘How many of the 20,000 are left?’ Gloria asked.
‘119.’ This was Octavius’s confidence again – founded, although Gloria didn’t know it, on his possession of a guide book of his own. ‘All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.’ He seemed, rightly, to judge this too mysterious. ‘But it’s lunch time, don’t you think? And we can look round a bit afterwards.’
Gloria wasn’t too excited to enjoy her lunch in what proved to be an open-air restuarant. But she was excited – and also, for some reason she couldn’t get down to, puzzled as well. Of course she was puzzled, for a start, by the spectacle of what was apparently happening to her. Apart from a brief and not agreeable impression which itself wasn’t exactly far back in time, she’d known this young man for less than a week. And nobody outside one of Mrs Bantry’s novelettes – she thought, recalling books she’d picked up in the kitchen at Nudd – totters on the verge of serious commitment on the strength of an acquaintanceship of quite that brevity. You’d have to belong to the most casual sleeping-around crowd to think of getting cracking at such a pace.
But then, she had to ask herself, was there what could be called a serious commitment in question? She now liked Octavius Chevalley very much – a good deal more, oddly enough, than before his bad behaviour on the previous night. But she wasn’t at all clear about what kind of liking it was. She was still interrogating herself about this as she ate something called mascapone, which Octavius had discovered on the menu and triumphantly declared to be the perfect close to a meal. It was certainly very good. But it didn’t answer Gloria’s question, which was simply whether she was in love with Octavius. And she failed to reflect – after all, she was very young – that it is a question which those who are in love don’t often have to ask themselves.
Yet however she wondered about herself, she wondered about Octavius a good deal more. When he wasn’t being gay he was being very nervous. And although this was right and proper – or at least was right and proper in a story-book way – there was something about the quality of it that was disturbing. He seemed less a man with something on his mind than a man with something on his chest. But that, of course, must be his folly on the gondola. If he was going to tell Gloria that he loved her (and by now she hadn’t a doubt that he was going to do just this), then he certainly had an awkward fence to take. The episode could no doubt be played down, passed off as a piece of fooling which had turned out a flop and in bad taste. At any rate, Octavius certainly felt he had to speak about it.
Gloria would have preferred him not to. She had now accepted Kirstie’s explanation of the affair, and was finding it touching rather than either offensive or even absurd. Octavius must be a very inexperienced young man to have fumbled after so odd a stratagem. Perhaps he did get things out of books, just as Kirstie had suggested. But that was rather appealing, really. It made him, somehow, as vulnerable as a boy – say, as a clever boy, without the resource of physical robustness, tumbled into the bullying and bewildering life of a big school.
There was very little lucidity in these thoughts of Gloria’s, and she certainly didn’t go on to ask whether they might hint a substantial element of the maternal in the hovering relationship between Octavius and herself. What she did go on to was to acknowledge that her whole speculation wasn’t quite in the target area. Octavius was certainly going to declare his passion (as Mrs Bantry’s authoresses would have put it). There was no question in her mind as to what. But he was also going to say she just didn’t know what.