Stone Virgin Read online

  He thought of the face of the Madonna running with water too copious for tears or rain, her drenched garments; then the alien grain of her body as he brought his face nearer, the ancient indifferent stuff of which she was made … The memory to accompany this came back at once; it had been near the surface of his mind all day; sensation rather than memory, the hush, the sense of sound or echo, not voices but the aftermath of voices, a quivering resonance; the long straight shadow and the two wet bodies standing quite close together. Man and woman? Yes. They were washing each other or putting water on each other. Summer light but indoors … He had been afraid afterwards, not at the time, not exactly afraid but as if he’d escaped something, some danger perhaps.

  Raikes stood up abruptly. Nothing wrong with my nerves. Then the idea came to him, an adventure for a man whose nerves were in good order. He had a key to the side door of the church, they had all been given one. He had a torch. He could go out and eat something, then he could let himself into the church and get a good leisurely look at these papers. As soon as this idea came to him he knew he was going to do it. And tonight was the night – delay would only increase the risk of the papers being locked up again or moved elsewhere.

  It was not that he really believed he would find anything new about the Madonna. On any sober assessment this was unlikely. Of course there was always the chance that something had been overlooked; people did not always realize the significance of what they saw. However, it was faith of another kind that spurred him on, some sense that he had been given a sign, that a message had been distilled for him from the otherwise tedious talk of the Tintoretto people. In any case, was he not doing this for his Madonna, his stone lady? It was a chivalric exploit he was engaged in, an adventure. His key and torch and the rubber-soled shoes he chose to wear were the accoutrements of knighthood. Knights were not supposed to worry about the odds against success.

  All the same, emerging on to the fondamenta, he obeyed to begin with a certain impulse of timidity, taking a direction away from the church, towards the Grand Canal. He had to wait for the dark, he reminded himself. And there was food to think about. As he reached the San Marcuola landing stage a vaporetto came in, its bows making fiery way through the bronze sheen of the water. On an impulse he got on and bought a ticket to the Rialto. There were not many passengers at this time of evening, between work and pleasure; a few people who had perhaps been working late and a group of German tourists who had probably come down from the station – they had their luggage standing beside them. All these people stayed on the covered section of the deck and Raikes was on his own standing at the stern rail.

  It was chilly out on the water and Raikes turned up the collar of his raincoat, watching across the glinting surface the marvellous succession of buildings over on his left, beginning with the Renaissance splendours of the Palazzo Vendramin; then church, scuola, palazzo in superb procession, their fronts faintly flushed in the dying light – again he thought how processional Venice was, how everything one did here seemed to fall into some recognizable ritual. Of course it was because Venice had not changed much, only decayed. This dirty noisy boat of theirs followed a time-hallowed triumphal progress, showing itself to the façades, which paraded themselves in turn. Like many ardent, lonely people Raikes possessed a strong vein of melancholy, and now he thought how sad it was, how very sad, this endless celebration of its own beauty the city indulged in, so long after the glory and energy had departed. It was something that could not be translated into human terms without heart-sickness – love diminishing in the midst of protestation.

  The vaporetto passed under the Rialto Bridge and deposited him at the landing stage. He walked back, crossed the bridge and found a small restaurant about halfway along the Fondamenta del Vin with a view over the water. Here he sat over a half-litre of Grignolino and a pizza quattro stagioni watching the flush gradually fade from the buildings opposite. The brick darkened, the stone paled, the water took on its leaden-rose hue – even tones of colour had their own ritual here. Then the lights began to come on, destroying the delicate melting equipoise of slate and rose on the water; lanterns on the marking poles out in the canal, the triple-headed street lights along the fondamenta, the prow lamps of gondolas.

  It was half dark when he left the restaurant. He crossed the bridge again and lingered for a while in the Campo San Bartolomeo in front of the statue of Goldoni. There was a pigeon on the playwright’s jaunty tricorn hat and another on his shoulder. Through the gathering darkness he looked down, Venice’s favourite son, streaked with pigeon droppings, blackened by corrosion, the genial cynicism of his expression still showing through. Humorous, indulgent, gregarious – Raikes found it difficult to imagine a man more different from himself.

  It was after nine o’clock, and quite dark, when he let himself in through the side door into the baptistery. He used his key to lock the door again from the inside, wincing nervously as the key repeated its grating sound in the lock. His torch played a wavering beam over the base of the Romanesque font, and in a sudden shaft he saw turbanned profiles of adoring kings, the patient back of a donkey, angels’ wings. It was a strange experience to see these fragments of the Christian story so briefly and tremulously illuminated. A faint light from the street lamps outside came through on the north side of the church, but Raikes remembered that the floor was up on that side and kept clear.

  He proceeded up the south aisle, his heart beating quickly, torch and eyes directed downwards at his uneasy feet. He caught the flesh tones of guilt and sorrow from the Tintorettos as he went by, the ghastly sprawl of dead Abel; Adam’s ribcage; Eve’s long flowing hair. In the sacristy he was obliged to negotiate once again the rollers, the trestles, the litter of objects everywhere. He caught sight of saints Dominic and Benedict looking severely at him. In the hush of the chapel he stopped to caution his heart before moving to where the files and cardboard boxes lay stacked on top of the cupboards and against the wall, below a painting by Vivarini, he noticed now, no mistaking that style. Birth of the Virgin. Be still, he told his heart. You are not a thief, you have a key.

  He knelt down below the mummy-swaddled, stunned-looking infant Mary, and began to look through the files on the floor. These contained papers of various kinds jumbled together without apparent order and not seeming to offer anything of interest: receipts for the most part or handwritten notes of expenditure without any signature on them, records of payment for oil, candles, repairs of various sorts, none of them going back earlier than the 1930s.

  Raikes looked through them quickly, with a gathering chill of disappointment. What he had been expecting to find he could not have said, but he had assumed it would be somehow immediately significant, that his hands would fall on it, just as his ears had caught the intelligence that files of paper were on view here.

  The folders were fairly new, he noticed. So was the tape. Someone had simply bundled the papers into them, tied them up and shoved them in the cupboards, probably in the course of preparing the church for the restoration. It looked as if they had been lying about loose before this – but somewhere dry, there was no mould on them though many were frayed and discoloured. Certainly they could not have been long in the chapterhouse, where it was very damp indeed. There were loose papers stacked against the wall, programmes of regattas and concerts of sacred music, yellow with age.

  He was looking, not very hopefully, in the cardboard boxes, when he came across a batch of papers with dates in the mid-nineteenth century: the same type of thing as before, small financial records, faded and difficult to read. Below this were some old account books. There were more account books in the next box, and several smaller notebooks with stiff black covers. Raikes fished one of these out at random, opened it, and found himself looking at details of small sums of money paid, for reasons he could not make out, to one Andrea Carpello, in October 1759. With revived excitement, a sudden prescience of success, he began to turn back the pages. There was no entry for June 1743, but there was one for
the twenty-eighth of April. Two ducats had been paid out on that day it seemed, in payment for services, though these were not specified. There was an address written against the sum, of which Raikes could make out only that it was in the San Giovanni Crisostomo district.

  He was kneeling on the hard floor, looking earnestly at this and trying to see some connection with the Madonna, when he heard – and it was quite distinct in the silence of the church – the grating sound of the side door being unlocked. He heard the door creak open and he heard steps and some moments later voices, a man’s and a woman’s, cautious and low.

  In two simultaneous movements Raikes seized the notebook and switched off his torch. He was dreadfully startled. He stood in the not quite complete darkness of the chapel, his heart loud in his ears, more breath to expel than his lungs seemed able to deal with. His first thought, and it was a very disagreeable one, was that the light of his torch had been seen and persons in authority had come to investigate. But these had not been the voices of investigators, no light had gone on, the steps were cautious. They were coming up through the church towards him. Now he saw glimmerings of torchlight from beyond the sacristy entrance. The woman uttered a brief, annoyed-sounding exclamation. The man spoke in low tones. The words were indistinct, but they sounded like English.

  Raikes stood motionless against the chapel wall. Were they thieves? Should he challenge them? He had left it rather late. They were inside the sacristy now and seemed to have come to a halt. The beam of their torch behaved erratically for some moments. He heard rustling sounds as of garments and a sort of intermittent murmuring, a swarming, summer sound, strangely inappropriate in that place. Then the man spoke, quietly but quite distinctly. ‘Hold the torch will you, Muriel,’ he said. ‘I’ll clear a space on the table. Otherwise things are going to get broken.’

  The voice was familiar, the reasonable tone, the Midlands accent. Raikes could imagine the visionary widening of the eyes in the torchlight. It was the Tintoretto man, Barfield. ‘A square metre will be ample,’ he heard the voice say.

  ‘We’ll do ourselves an injury one of these days,’ the woman said, ‘clambering about on tables.’ Raikes recognized the crosspatch voice: it was the older assistant.

  There was no escape, no way out except through the sacristy. Raikes attempted to close his mind to what he was hearing and about to hear by tracing the lineaments of the Vivarini Nativity of the Virgin on the wall above him. All that was visible were the areas of white, and these only faintly; the headcloths of the women and the swaddling bands of the baby made a diagonal line from left to right, with the head of the infant almost but not quite in the centre. He tried to remember the faces of the women attendants, distraught with excess of reverence, the dazed-looking bobbin of a baby …

  ‘Muriel,’ came Barfield’s voice again, ‘do you think you could spread yourself a bit? The angle needs to be increased by about five degrees. As things are at present I can’t get in.’

  ‘I’m hanging off the bloody table already,’ Muriel said. ‘Wait a minute … Ooh!’

  ‘That’s better,’ Barfield said. ‘That’s much better. Hooray!’

  ‘Ooh!’ Muriel exclaimed again. ‘Oh, Jerry.’

  ‘Now, you bitch,’ Barfield said with sudden savagery. ‘Now I’ll teach you. Take that. You slut.’

  ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,’ Muriel moaned. ‘I’m sorry, Jerry.’

  ‘Think I’m a bloody geriatric, do you?’ Barfield said through clenched teeth, and this was quite the most appalling pun Raikes could ever remember hearing. ‘Think I can’t fuck you on a table without doing myself an injury, do you? Take that and that.’ Some object fell with a slight crash to the floor. There was a woeful preliminary groan from Barfield, interrupting his furious abuse. Raikes stood amazed in the darkness. He could hardly believe it even now. There in the sacristy, in the presence of the Virgin and Three Saints above the altar, the marble Pietà behind them, saints Dominic and Benedict on the wall, all the women saints and martyrs in the panels, objects of sacred devotion all round them, Barfield and his assistant were knowing each other carnally, acting out strange roles, different from those of every day, combining tones of rage and pleading.

  It seemed to take a long time for this performance to run its course, sounds to abate, clothing to be readjusted. Barfield, restored to his usual pedantic mildness, made one or two anticlimactic remarks and Muriel answered snappishly. The sound of their steps receded. However, for quite some time longer, Raikes remained where he was, motionless in the dark. It was an effort for him to switch on his torch again. Finally, still clutching the notebook, he crept out of the church and set himself towards home.

  Speculations crowded his mind as he walked back. Why had they chosen the sacristy? Did the element of blasphemy add to the pleasure? Was Barfield activated only in the near vicinity of his restoration project? Perhaps there were people for whom cluttered tables and cramped positions were essential preconditions. A sort of variant of bondage sex, he thought vaguely. His own experience provided little help; but no practice, however outlandish, could lack for devotees somewhere surely, sexual habits being in that respect like religious cults …

  These thoughts did not finally disappear until he found himself once more in his apartment, with the curtains drawn, looking at the notebook by the light of the table lamp. It was not a proper account book, the lines had been ruled by hand and the widths between them varied. It seemed more like a casual record of small incidental payments, perhaps made out of petty cash, which would be totalled and entered under a single heading in the official ledger. The writing was in ink, a spidery copperplate, much faded – and effaced altogether in places where there had been some friction in the pages. But the entry he was interested in was reasonably clear, except for a word in brackets in the cash column. The address was in San Giovanni Crisostomo: 5169 Calle Guanara. It seemed an improbably high number for the house …

  Raikes was gripped again by the excitement he had experienced on finding the notebook and which had been overlaid in the interval by the behaviour of the Tintoretto people. He tried to enjoin caution on himself. The entry in the notebook might not have anything to do with the Madonna. There was really only the date to go on and that could be – quite probably was – purely coincidental. But it was in vain. He thought of the circumstances in which he had found the notebook, the haphazard way in which it had come about, as if vouchsafed to his blundering fingers, revealed to his vague eyes. What if I have been chosen? he thought. What if I am the one chosen to clear up the mystery?

  Restlessly he got up and went to the window. He parted the curtains a little and looked out. It was high tide. In the light from the campo beyond the bridge he saw the water washing over the steps of the house gate opposite, almost at the level of the fondamenta – another six inches and it would be flooding right over. Water covered the top step, levelled for a few seconds in a translucent skin over the stone, slopped gently off again. There was to his sense in this brief steadiness of the water, its momentary unrufflement as it lay across the step with the pale stone shining through it, something devotional, something sacramental; though he was aware of that surprise, and even faint alarm felt before in Venice at the sight of water where water had no business to be, water creeping among the abodes of man in the silence of the night, disregarded. It was as if these steps and walls and the quayside itself, all this washed and accommodating stone, though seeming to be fashioned for man’s purposes, now in his absence had reverted to its own, which was the celebration of the beauty and supremacy of the brimming water, whose levels were rising year by year and slowly drowning the city …

  He returned to the table and stood looking down at the notebook. There was no other entry on this page, only three altogether for April and none at all for the previous month, confirming his belief that the sums were from some small fund for occasional expenses. But only this entry, as far as he could see, had a bracketed word in the cash column. This was difficult to make out,
especially the first part of it, because the paper had worn smooth there. Denari he had taken it to be, the Italian word for money. But it seemed to have more letters than that. Lamplight reflected from the worn patch, making things more difficult. Acting on sudden impulse, Raikes went down on his knees and held the page up against the light. Afterwards he was to wonder whether it was the filtering light itself or heat from the lamp operating in some way, but the imprint was now quite clear and unmistakable. The word was Fornarini.

  4

  ‘THAT IS A very old name,’ Wiseman said. ‘Goes back a long way. They were one of the original twenty-four, or so it is claimed. My gosh, yes.’ He blinked and chuckled at the thought of this. Venice was his hobby and his passion.

  Raikes smiled in response, glad to find that Wiseman knew something about it, endeared by the other’s enthusiasm, which he recognized again now after the years in which they had not met; it was the quality they shared and which had kept them friends. ‘Who were they?’ he said. Here in this sheltered spot, the sun warm on his face, digesting his spaghetti alle vongole and veal cutlet, half the Merlot still left in the bottle, he felt a sense of well-being and expansiveness. ‘Sounds like a magic number,’ he said. ‘Were they the founders of the city?’

  ‘They were the original families who ruled as tribunes over the Lagoon islands. This was before there was any Venice at all, at least as we know it now – there was no settlement on the Rialto yet. We’re going back to the seventh century, a fairly misty period, which is why a lot of the claims can’t be authenticated. The Fornarini, for example, claim a semi-mythic ancestry going back to the founders of Rome. That’s nonsense of course. Still, they are one of the oldest.’