He was walking slowly up his Long Gallery. The rain was beating on the windows. Orlando noticed that the plaster was beginning to rot away underneath the pane. He kicked it gently with his right boot. There was a small white cloud and tiny fragments of plaster, dirty white and grey, settled slowly on the floor. Maybe the rats would like to have them for their afternoon tea.
Gainsborough? he said to himself. No, he’d just delivered one of those. Sir Thomas Lawrence? Orlando always felt close to Lawrence – the man had earned many fortunes and never managed to hold on to any of them. Hoppner, bit further away in time? The splendidly named Zoffany who Orlando felt should have been a Greek philosopher, forever arguing with Socrates in the public squares of Athens? None of those, he decided. Sir Joshua Reynolds was the man, grander than Gainsborough, the man who brought Italian techniques back into English painting. Mr and Mrs Black? Double or single? He wondered briefly if the price would be less today for a single portrait as it was when Reynolds was in his pomp. Probably not.
Orlando turned and looked at one of the messages on his wall. He had dozens of these, pinned all around the Long Gallery, extracts from works of art history or quotations about Old Masters. This was one of his favourites:
On the lowest tier were arranged false beards, masks and carnival disguises; above came volumes of the Latin and Italian poets, among others Boccaccio, the Morgante of Pulci, and Petrarch, partly in the form of valuable printed parchments and illuminated manuscripts; then women’s ornaments and toilet articles, scents, mirrors, veils and false hair; higher up, lutes, harps, chessboards, playing cards; and finally, on the two uppermost tiers, paintings only, especially of female beauties . . .
The words came from Jacob Burckhardt’s book on The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, published some forty years before, sitting happily in a first edition on Orlando’s bookshelves. It described the precise order in which objects were placed on the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence in 1497, the Dominican friar Savonarola no doubt supervising the arrangements in person. Orlando always felt proud of his profession. Above, and therefore more important than the books, above the masks, above the devices to enhance women’s beauty, above the musical instruments, came the paintings, especially of female beauties. Orlando would make Mrs Lewis B. Black a beauty, fit for any bonfire.
He thought of his own beauty, cast into a different sort of bonfire, a bonfire of a marriage to a man she did not love. Orlando suddenly remembered the night he had fallen in love with Imogen, three weeks after he met her. He let the memories wash over him as he walked back to one of the great windows and stared out at the rain falling on the ruined gardens. It had been at a ball, a ball in one of the most romantic houses in England. The house itself was quite small, surrounded by a moat, and boasting three priest’s holes inside where the persecuted Jesuits were said to have hidden from the agents of the Elizabethan state. Imogen had been very excited by those, climbing into one and demanding that Orlando close the secret door for at least ten minutes so she could understand what it must have been like.
It had been early summer, Orlando recalled. There was a great marquee round two sides of the house, open to the water. Imogen and he had danced for most of the night. They dined on lobsters, washed down with pink champagne, and strawberries, sitting at the very edge of the marquee, their feet almost touching the green water of the moat. Orlando remembered that a drop or two of strawberry juice had fallen on to his sleeve. When it dried it looked like blood on his cuff.
As the dawn came Orlando and Imogen were so passionately in love with each other that the other dancers moved away to make room for them. It was as if they were in the centre of an enchanted circle, a circle of love so bright that it dazzled their neighbours on the wooden floor. Orlando remembered it as a feeling of ekstasis, ecstasy, standing almost outside yourself to worship the grace and the beauty of the girl you held in your arms. He looked again at his quotation. Perhaps the flames of their love had been too bright. Perhaps the two of them had been consumed like the vanities in Savonarola’s bonfire.
When the music stopped they had gone for a walk in the soft morning light. The birds had been up for hours to welcome another dawn. Dew glistened off the fields. He told Imogen he loved her under a great sycamore tree that had stood for hundreds of years. Maybe the tree had sheltered other lovers in the past.
In the days that followed – why were his memories always of bright sunshine, Orlando wondered, had it never rained? – they would meet for walks across Hyde Park, past the gleaming horses on Rotten Row, past Prince Albert’s statue to look at a different circle, the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Once he had taken Imogen to Windsor and he had rowed her up the Thames in a boat. She had a broad-brimmed hat to keep the sun off and she leaned back on her cushions in the stern of the boat, her face in shadow, her hand trailing in the water, her eyes fixed on her boatman. As they went upriver the noise of the town died away. The mighty castle, grey and forbidding even in the sunlight, seemed to shrink in size. The only noise was the singing of the birds and the soft plops of Orlando’s oars.
‘“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”’ Orlando whispered.
‘“Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”’
Imogen had laughed. ‘Two people can play Shakespeare sonnets, you know,’ she said, ‘the nuns were very keen on Shakespeare sonnets. Well, most of them.
‘“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”’
They pulled the boat into the side of the river and tied it up under a pair of weeping willows, the water dark and cool in the shade. They set out for a short walk across the empty fields.
Imogen had her arm wrapped round Orlando’s waist. She stopped suddenly and looked straight into his blue eyes. ‘We’re not doomed, are we, Orlando?’ she said. ‘We’re not going to the edge?’
Imogen had met him off the train when he came back from Monte Carlo. She laughed that reckless laugh of hers when he told her about his failure, that there was no fortune to secure their future.
‘It’s fate,’ she said. Orlando often wondered if the fate of doomed love had some secret appeal for Imogen. ‘Fate is now calling me to a different future,’ she said, nestling closely to him as the crowds streamed down the platform. She took him for tea in the great hotel at the side of the station. There, amidst the potted palms and the trays of sandwiches and the distant music of the orchestra, she told him the terrible tidings.
‘In three weeks’ time, at St James’s Piccadilly, I am to be married. I do not love him. I will never love him. I will not bear his children. But my father insists.’ She paused while the waiter brought the tea. He smiled at them. The circle of love was still wrapped around the pair in spite of the terrible news.
‘I shall not give you up, Orlando,’ she said defiantly. ‘I shall never give you up. Whatever happens.’