She frowned and looked sombre.
“Let’s go into the ballroom,” she said. “We’re all by ourselves here.”
X
THE DAY AFTER THE BALL, Cornélie had a strange feeling; suddenly, as she savoured her superb Genzano, ordered by Rudyard, she realised that it was no coincidence that she was sitting with the baroness and her daughter, Urania and Miss Taylor; realised that the marchesa definitely had an ulterior motive with that arrangement. Rudyard, always polite, thoughtful, always attentive, always with a ticket or an introduction in his pocket that was difficult to obtain, or at least so he led them to believe, and talked the whole time, recently mainly with Miss Taylor, who went faithfully to listen to all the lovely church music and always came home in raptures. The pale, simple, skinny English lady, who was at first enthralled by museums, ruins and sunsets on the Aventine or Monte Mario, and was always tired from her wanderings through Rome, henceforth devoted herself entirely to the hundreds of churches, viewed and studied every one, and especially attended religiously all musical services and was ecstatic about the choir of the Sistine Chapel and the trembling glories of the male sopranos.
Cornélie talked to Mrs Van der Staal and Baroness Von Rothkirch about what she had caught of the conversation between the marchesa and her nephew through the chink in the door but neither of them, although intrigued, took the words of the marchesa seriously, and regarded them as simply a frivolous ball conversation between a scatterbrained woman, who was keen to match-make, and her reluctant nephew. It struck Cornélie how unwilling people are to believe in seriousness, but the baroness was very nonchalant, said that Rudyard would not do her any harm and still always gave her tickets, and Mrs Van der Staal, who had been long in Rome and used to pensione intrigues, thought that Cornélie was getting too worked up about the fate of the beautiful Urania. However, Miss Taylor had suddenly disappeared from table. People thought she was ill, when it emerged that she had left the Pensione Belloni, but after a few days it was common knowledge through the whole pensione that Miss Taylor had converted to Catholicism and moved into a pensione recommended to her by Rudyard: a boarding-house frequented by many monsignori and where there was a spiritual atmosphere. Her disappearance gave something forced to the conversation between Rudyard, the German ladies and Cornélie and the latter, during a week that the baroness spent in Naples, changed her place and joined her compatriots at table. The Rothkirchs also changed — because of the draught, as the baroness assured the management; new guests took their places: and among those new elements Urania was left alone at table with Rudyard for lunch and dinner. Cornélie blamed herself and on one occasion had a serious talk with the American girl and warned her. But she did not dare tell her what she had overheard at the ball, and her warning made no impression on Urania. And when Rudyard had obtained the privilege of a private audience with the Pope for Miss Hope, Urania refused to hear another bad word said about Rudyard and found him the kindest man she had ever met, Jesuit or not.
But a pall of mystery continued to cloak Rudyard in the hotel, and people could not agree whether he was a jesuit or even whether he was a priest or a layman.
XI
“WHAT DO YOU CARE about those strange people?” he asked.
They were sitting in his studio, Mrs Van der Staal, Cornélie and the girls, Annie and Emilie. Annie poured tea and they talked about Miss Taylor and Urania.
“I’m a stranger to you too!” replied Cornélie.
“You’re not a stranger to me, to us … But I couldn’t care less about Miss Taylor or Urania. Hundreds of ghosts haunt our lives: I don’t see them and feel nothing for them …”
“And aren’t I a ghost?”
“I’ve talked to you too much in Borghese and on the Palatine to think you a ghost.”
“Rudyard is a dangerous ghost,” said Annie.
“He has no hold over us,” replied Duco.
Mrs Van der Staal looked at Cornélie. She understood the look and said, with a laugh,
“No, he has no hold over me either … Yet, if I had had need of religion — I mean church religion — I’d rather be Roman Catholic than Calvinist. But now …”
She did not finish her sentence. She felt safe in this studio, in this soft, multi-coloured swirl of beautiful objects, in their sympathetic presence: she felt in harmony with all of them: with the charming and worldly air of the rather superficial mother and her two beautiful girls: a little doll-like and vaguely cosmopolitan, quite vain about young marquesses with whom they danced and cycled, and with the son, the brother, so completely different from the three women and yet visibly related in a movement, a gesture, the occasional word. It also struck Cornélie that they accepted each other lovingly as they were; Duco his mother and sister with their stories about the Princesses Golonna and Odescalchi; Mrs Van der Staal and the girls, him, with his old jacket and dishevelled hair. And when he began talking, especially talking about Rome, when he put his dream into words, in words that were almost fit for a book, but which flowed so gradually and naturally from his lips, Cornélie felt harmonious, felt safe, interested, and lost a little of the urge to contradict that his artistic indolence sometimes awakened in her. And apart from that his indolence suddenly seemed to her only apparent, and perhaps affectation, since he showed her sketches, watercolours, none of them finished, but each watercolour vibrant with light, especially with light, with the light of all Italy: the pearly sunsets across the fluid emerald of Venice; Florence’s towers drawn with dreamy vagueness in tender rose-coloured skies; fortress-like Siena blue-black in bluish moonlight; orange sunflares behind St Peter’s, and especially the ruins and in every light: the Forum in fierce sunlight, the Palatine in the evening twilight, the Colosseum mysterious in the night, and then the Campagna: the dream skies and hazy light of the cheerful and sad Campagna, with soft pink mauves, dewy blues, dusky violet, of the brash ochres of pyrotechnic sunsets, and fanning clouds like purple phoenix wings. And when Cornélie asked him why nothing was finished, he replied that nothing was any good. He saw the skies as dreams, visions and apotheoses, and on paper they were water and paint, and paint could be finished. And then he lacked self-confidence. And then he abandoned his skies, he said, and copied Byzantine Madonnas.
When he saw that his watercolours nevertheless interested her, he went on talking about himself, telling her how he first enthused about the noble and naive Primitives, Giotto and especially Lippo Memmi … How subsequently, spending a year in Paris, he had found that nothing compared with Forain: dry, cool satire in two or three lines; how then, in the Louvre, Rubens had revealed himself: Rubens, whose unique talent and unique brush he had traced among all the imitation and apprentice work of his numerous pupils, until he was able to say which cherub was by Rubens himself in a sky full of cherubs painted by four or five pupils.
And then, he said, he did not think about painting for weeks, and did not pick up a paintbrush, and went to the Vatican every day and was totally absorbed by the noble marbles.
Once he had spent a whole morning sitting dreaming in front of Eros, once he had dreamed up a poem accompanied by a very faint monotonous melody, like a devout incantation: at home he had wanted to put down the poem and the music on paper, but had not been able. He could no longer stand Forain, found Rubens disgusting and coarse, and had remained loyal to the Primitives.
“And suppose I painted a lot and sent a lot to exhibitions? Would I be happier? Would I feel satisfaction at having done something? I don’t think so. Sometimes I finish a watercolour, sell it, and I can survive for a month without troubling mama. I don’t care about money. Ambition is totally alien to me! But don’t let’s talk about me. Are you still thinking about the future and … bread?”